Expressway to prosperity!
Jagvir Goyal
THE world has caught speed. And to keep pace or to forge ahead, a country has to put itself on an expressway (not road) to prosperity! So India has taken the cue. In the first instance, a 28-km-long expressway has now been taken up between Delhi and Gurgaon as a part of the Golden Quadrilateral Project.

New products & discoveries
Plants that make their own heat
"The dead-horse arum of Corsica looks and smells like the south end of a horse that died going north," says Roger Seymour. He's actually talking about a plant, and a more prosaic soul might add that it belongs to the same family as calla lilies and jack-in-the-pulpits.

• People resemble eggs, acoustically

Expressway to prosperity!
Jagvir Goyal

THE world has caught speed. And to keep pace or to forge ahead, a country has to put itself on an expressway (not road) to prosperity! So India has taken the cue. In the first instance, a 28-km-long expressway has now been taken up between Delhi and Gurgaon as a part of the Golden Quadrilateral Project.

Named as "Project Highway", the expressway is a part of the ambitious National Highway Development Project (NHDP) drawn by the government to develop world class roads with uninterrupted traffic flow by spending Rs. 54,000 crore on it. Golden Quadrilateral Project (QDP) forms a part of NHDP to develop 5846 km long roads to connect Delhi-Mumbai-Chennai-Kolkata-Delhi. And Project Highway (PH) or Expressway is a part of QDP.

Catering to very high traffic volumes to the tune of 1,20,000 vehicles per day and having 20 intersections along its 28 kilometre long stretch, the present four lane National Highway (NH-8) between Delhi and Gurgaon faces acute congestion all the time, leading to considerable loss of time and fuel besides causing abnormal pollution in the area. It is, in fact, one of the busiest arteries on the National Highway network. NHAI (National Highway Authority of India) has therefore assigned top priority to the construction of this expressway which has started developing foundations now and is expected to be opened in mid 2005.

Speed thrills but kills, it is said. But not on an expressway! Because expressways, as their name suggests, are designed for high speeds. The time thus saved is incredible. The Delhi-Gurgaon expressway will cut short the travel time between the two stations from 65 minutes to flat 20 minutes.

Time is Money. So paying a toll tax to save precious 45 minutes is not a bad bargain. Not only time, but there is a saving in fuel and you avoid lots of fuel, heat and hassles. This is perhaps the theory of the future: Shell out some bucks, have better services, better quality and save time. And utilise the saving to accomplish your lined up tasks.

The NHAI does not spend a penny on the construction of the Delhi-Gurgaon expressway. Normally, projects are based on the value of the government grant to be received. In this case, rather a substantial amount of Rs 61.06 crore has been paid to the government by the company that is constructing the expressway. This has happened for the first time that an authority of the government has been paid for allowing a company to build an expressway by spending Rs 555 crore on it from its own pocket.

The expressway is not a simple and small project. Starting from Km 14.3 in Delhi near Rao Tularam Marg and ending at Km 42.0 in Gurgaon, it has seven flyovers in it, five of them having eight lanes! There is a four-lane flyover and another one is having three lanes because of some space restrictions. In addition, there are five underpasses. Service roads provided on both sides of the expressway are mostly 7.5 metres wide and amount to 46.84 km length. These will be used by the two-wheelers. The median strip width on the expressway is 4.0 metres. Most of the expressway (82 per cent) is eight-laned while the balance (18 per cent) is six-laned. Rs. 275.00 crore is to be spent annually for two years if the expressway is to be completed in time. Significantly, there will be no intersections and all the 20 intersections existing at present will be taken care of.

NH-8 connects Mumbai to Delhi and northern regions of the country and carries a sizable amount of inter-state and intra-state traffic. Its Delhi-Gurgaon section from Km 14.300 to Km 42.000 has only four lanes for 82 per cent of its 27.7 km length and six lanes for the balance 18 per cent length. It constitutes India's highest vehicle density region. So the expressway couldn't be more well timed.

Two companies, namely Jaiprakash Industries and DS Constructions, have formed a joint venture, Jaypee DSC Ventures Ltd (JDVL), to execute the expressway. The joint venture has not only taken up the execution of the expressway but has paid Rs 61.06 crore to the NHAI for awarding it the project to construct, maintain and draw toll tax for a period of 20 years. The firm seems to be on a sure footing to earn in the long run and the NHAI as well as the country has nothing to lose. Nor will be the users who will save time and fuel in lieu of paying the toll. The fuel saving alone on account of coming up of this expressway is estimated to be Rs 8000 crore per annum. The construction period is included in the 20-year term itself. It is a smart move of the NHAI. It will force the firm to try for completing the project at the earliest to start recovering its huge investments.

The toll rates have also been specified in the agreement between the NHAI and the JDVL. January 1, 2005 has been fixed as the Commercial Operation Date for the collection of toll. Toll fees will be shared by the NHAI and JDVL if the number of vehicles exceeds a specified number. Three toll plazas have been planned on the expressway. First is at the road to Indira Gandhi International Airport, second at the Delhi Haryana border and third at the 42-km milestone. Toll rates are the least at the IGI Airport road entrance and the maximum at 42-km point. There is a provision of concessional fee for local traffic, the concession varying from 50 per cent to 66 per cent.

Expressway construction demands meticulous planning and a number of agencies are required to coordinate when such a complicated expressway having so many flyovers and underpasses is planned to be constructed.

Besides the parent government department and the construction agency, technical arrangements for the detailed design and engineering of roads and flyovers are to be made; proof consultants are to be hired; traffic estimates are to be made; commercial policy is to be decided; tolling strategy is to be finalised to the finest details and operation and maintenance plans are to be formed and approved.

Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway can be reckoned as the most impressive scheme underway. As per the studies conducted by RITES consortium on behalf of NHAI, a volume of 1.20 lakh vehicles per day has been observed on the Delhi-Gurgaon road. This is expected to rise by 7.5 per cent per annum till 2007 and by 6 per cent per annum thereafter. When an expressway is constructed on such a busy road, it is compulsory to take extra safety measures to prevent speed accidents.

For this, there must not be any sharp curves on the expressway, embankments should not be too high, all fixed objects such as trees must be isolated and the movement of two-wheelers and pedestrians should be regulated in a strict manner.

We hope all these will be constantly kept in view during the progress of expressway and it sparks off a chain of such projects in and around the country.

New products & discoveries
Plants that make their own heat

The dead-horse arum exudes such a carcasslike fragrance that female blowflies arrive and lay eggs as if the flower were an inviting hunk of carrion.

"The dead-horse arum of Corsica looks and smells like the south end of a horse that died going north," says Roger Seymour. He's actually talking about a plant, and a more prosaic soul might add that it belongs to the same family as calla lilies and jack-in-the-pulpits. Seymour is a zoologist, and the plants he studies show an animalistic feature: They can generate body heat. Most plants, including calla lilies and jack-in-the-pulpits, simply assume the ambient temperature because their metabolic reactions hum along so gently that they don't give off bursts of heat.

The dead-horse arum, however, belongs to the group of several hundred plant species scattered among some 10 families that can rev up their own furnaces. That heat can launch strong odours, like those of a dumpster in August. In winter, warm flowers can melt snow.

People resemble eggs, acoustically

Using a sound-based scanning technique to determine the shapes of moving creatures and other objects, an international team of scientists has found that the human form bounces sound waves as if each person were a huge, elongated chicken egg.

This new acoustic portrait of people as a hard ellipsoid may aid designers of concert halls and other venues where acoustics are of paramount concern, says Stéphane G. Conti of the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, Calif. Until now, no one had measured the absolute acoustic profile of the human body-that is, how the body scatters sound waves independently of where it happens to be.

This new acoustic description “should have application everywhere a human is embedded in an acoustic soundscape,” comments acoustics specialist Vincent Gibiat of the Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France.

In a hard-walled room, sound waves rebound from an object along paths determined by the object’s shape. So, each object creates a distinctive interference pattern and intensity spectrum.

UNDERSTANDING THE UNIVERSE
WITH PROF YASH PAL

Why does the earth behave like a magnet?

There are still arguments about the mechanisms through which planetary magnetic fields are produced. It is believed that some conditions must be fulfilled.

1. There must be a conducting core in the planet. Earth has it because it is believed to have an iron core.

2. There should also be a heat source inside to produce convection currents in the conducting material.

3. The planet should be rotating reasonably fast.

These conditions are satisfied for the earth, not for the moon, mars and mercury. Mercury does have a weak magnetic field whose origin is still under discussion. It should have cooled inside and would not have any conducting material swirling around. Venus would be a candidate but is cancelled out because it rotates very slowly — once every 243 earth days. The required conditions are well satisfied for Jupiter. It is large, very hot inside with lot of convection and fast rate of rotation — once every 10 hours. It is believed that the conducting material is provided by hot metallic hydrogen under very high pressure. Jupiter has a strong magnetic field.

A conductor moving across the weakest of magnetic fields produces electric currents that in turn maintain the magnetic field. Clearly there is no bar magnet sitting inside the earth or any of the other planets.

(Incidentally a source of heating inside the earth, which keeps the convection going and, therefore, is also responsible for the phenomenon of plate tectonics, is believed to be radioactivity). The dominant shape of the magnetic field is that of a dipole, rather similar to that which would be produced by a bar magnet which also has two poles. That the poles of the earth’s magnetic field lie close to the geographic north and south is not a complete accident.

Remember that the earth rotates around a north-south axis. You would notice that the relatively simple looking question you have asked has connections with many parameters of the structure of the earth and its large-scale evolution and dynamics. I am sure there is a lot more understanding required in this area.

Why, while sitting in a train, we sometimes feel that the train has started while actually it is the other train that has started moving?

We do not sense uniform motion in a straight line because all laws are exactly the same in all frames of reference moving at a uniform speed with respect to each other. We sense only accelerations. We are aware of the motion of our train when we look outside and see the ground moving backwards. We also know that the whole earth will never start moving. We also feel small jerks in the fast moving train we are riding. But moving out from a station can be smooth. If the train we are watching quietly starts moving and we are seeing nothing outside except that train it is natural to feel that we have started moving. You cannot tell the difference if there are no jerks or give away sounds. This principle is called Galilean relativity.

Can smoke be collected and stored?

I do not know why you are curious about this. Smoke contains the products of combustion - carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and some air, as we know it - and small particles of carbon. They can all be put in a bottle and sealed. After sometime the soot or carbon particles would settle down or deposit on the walls of the bottle. What you do with this is your own affair.