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Environment management is in
Arsenic to cure leukaemia Prof Yash
Pal Understanding the Universe Keeping soldiers cool Carbon to rival nanotubes Tailored bacteria
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Environment
management is in Environment is no longer the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink or the house, which we live in. It is becoming, a mandatory requirement, for the business houses to have an environment friendly internal working, and the final product worth international environment norms. Environment management is emerging as a major thrust area. It will include all the new policies, procedures, programmes and practices to boost environment conditions of the company. This shall pave the way, for cost savings, customer requirements, enhance corporate image, ensure legislation implementation, protect investments, reduce insurance premiums and last but not the least, enhance market opportunities. An environment management system (EMS) is a set of management processes and procedures which enable an organisation to analyze, control and reduce the environmental impact of its activities, products and services. The International Organisation for Standardization (ISO), located in Geneva, Switzerland caters to the development and implementation of international standards for products and environmental related issues Most of the ISO standards are developed through a consensus based approach of each member country representative. ISO 14000 refers to the standards in the environment field. ISO 14001 is an internationally recognised environment management system (EMS) standard and is included in the ISO 14000 series. The ISO 14001 standard depicts requirements for unfolding a well documented, environmental policy, objectives, activities, management, monitoring, and review and corrective measures. ISO 14001 follows a similar approach as in ISO 9000. At the same time, ISO 14001 has a better way to handle the economics part than followed by ISO 9000. ISO 14001 takes into consideration the setting of quantified targets, emergency exigencies, prevention of pollution, compliance with legislation and regulations and public disclosure of the environment policy of the company. The environmental management systems (ISO 14001) will have different modules like environmental policy, planning, implementation and operation, checking and corrective action, and finally the management review. The planning stage will include all the environmental aspects, legal requirements, environment management programmes, objectives and targets. Implementation and operation stage will define the structure and responsibility training and documentation control, and preparing for emergencies. Checking and corrective action will include monitoring and measurement, nonconformance, preventive and corrective actions. EMS audit is also conducted at this level. Then comes the management review. The top management has a major role in EMS implementation as the employees throughout the organisation have to participate in this activity. It is a proven fact now that EMS yields financial savings. At the same time it leads to better business practices. The prominent domains needing immediate EMS attention are the management of fuel energy, water, waste, transport, emissions to air, and noise. Conformance to ISO-14001 EMS is going to become a mandatory requirement for industry. This will enable the companies to remain competitive in global market and ensure “green” products. |
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Arsenic to cure leukaemia
It’s best known as a weed-killer or a favourite weapon of murderous old ladies, but arsenic could find a new role as a mainstream treatment for leukaemia, Iranian researchers said. They were so impressed with trials involving patients with a rare type of leukaemia that they have suggested it could be used as an initial treatment. “There have been a few studies done using arsenic...but we are the first group to suggest that it is acceptable as a first-line treatment,” Dr Ardeshir Ghavamzadeh of Tehran University of Medical Sciences says in a statement. In a study reported at a European oncology meeting in Geneva, the researchers said arsenic was effective against acute promyeloctytic leukaemia, or APL, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow that affects myeloid or white blood cells. APL, which affects 20,000 people worldwide, is most common in the elderly. It is a subtype of acute myeloid leukaemia, the most common form of adult leukaemia. Ninety per cent of 63 patients who had not been previously treated for the illness had complete remission after two courses of the arsenic treatment. More than 88 per cent were still alive with a mean survival time of nearly 34 months. “What this means is that we now have the possibility of offering APL patients a new first-line treatment that avoids conventional chemotherapy,” said Ghavamzadeh. Arsenic compounds have been used in medicine for thousands of years, dating back to the ancient Chinese and Romans, In the 1980s, Chinese researchers first tried it in leukaemia after discovering it was an active ingredient in some traditional Chinese medicines, according to the researchers. The poison was made famous in the 1944 film “Arsenic and Old Lace” starring Cary Grant. It was based on a stage play of the same name.
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Understanding the Universe My question might sound a bit absurd, but I am putting it forward after having thought about it quite a bit. Is there any possibility that humans are a minute part of a large organism, the existence of which and the dimensions of which are presently beyond our comprehension? Your wondering is not so absurd. Such thoughts have occurred to several persons. Ecological thinking emphasises a similar train of thought. Our planet is in a very delicate balance. We have just the right fraction of oxygen in the atmosphere. A little more or a little less would not do — at least for the kind of life that inhabits the planet now. The atmospheric composition has colluded with the sun to ensure that we have an ozone layer to protect us. The temperature on the earth is maintained within very stringent limits so well. It could very well have been hundreds of degrees higher, as on Venus! This is maintained by a fantastic air-conditioning system that works effortlessly, with the involvement of so many features and so many kinds of life. It seems that the balance could easily be tilted in a direction such that we might have a runaway greenhouse effect, the death destruction of the ozone layer and much else. Because of all these aspects, it is attractive sometimes to think of the planet as an organism of which we are just a small component. It is not ours to exploit, only ours to maintain for the coming generations. Elimination, even reduction, of bio-diversity might have disastrous consequences. It is possible of course, that the planet will adapt itself to another state of existence in which we humans do not figure. Even though we find it hard to get away from the misconception that all this of creation was meant for us, we might be a very brief temporal component of the history of the planet. One hopes that we will not work to make it our stay even more brief than what it might otherwise be. While we are entertaining such thoughts, a subset of such thinking may also merit some consideration. A friend of mine once wondered aloud that each of us might be like a single cell in relation to the whole of human society. The number of humans on the planet is now rather similar to the number of cells in our bodies. In this sense, the whole of humanity might also be considered a single organism — particularly now that interdependence and the communication systems can keep us in an interacting soup! If so, this organism has a long way to go before it begins to behave like one. Furthermore, if some “cells” in the organism become oblivious of the importance and needs of ten million others sharing the same home, our future might not be so secure. I doubt if parochialism of any kind is an enhancing influence in the long run. The dilemma is that the way we are constructed, we often make a virtue of infinite parochialism. Otherwise, we would not have had to constantly deal with regional and national conflicts, or the fundamentalist agendas of various kinds. What is antimatter?
The answer to this question could be simple or detailed. I would stay with what I hope is a simple explanation. We all know that an electron has a negative charge. We also know that a proton has an equal and opposite (positive) charge. Incidentally, calling one negative and the other positive is only a convention. But this convention already recognises that there is a two-ness to the property we call charge. About 70 years ago, Paul Dirac tried to construct a theory of the electron, and he was surprised that the same equations also described a particle of the same mass but opposite, namely positive charge. If you were to start with vacuum, with no charge or mass, but enough energy was available, you could create a negative electron along with positive electron if the process could conserve energy and momentum. The positive electron now called the positron is an anti-particle of the electron. The positron was discovered a year after Dirac gave his theory in cosmic rays, where a gamma ray, scattered off a nucleus, and created an electron-positron pair. It was clear from then on that we must also have an anti-particle for the proton that will have the same mass but a negative charge. Such particles have also been discovered. It is then clear that as far as chemistry is concerned, there would be no difference between a hydrogen atom made of a positive proton and negative electron and another one made of a negative proton and a positive electron. An earth made of the elements we know could not be distinguished, by an observer in another solar system, from one made of the very same anti-elements. The two could have exactly the same geology, chemistry and life. The only requirement for a future for either of them would be that they stay away from each other because a contact between them would result in annihilation of the both into an enormous ball of energy. The problem remains, however. If both a universe and anti-universe were theoretically possible and if they would have had indistinguishable fortunes, how come only one was chosen? It is another matter that if such a differentiation had not occurred, we would not have been around. Nevertheless, this question remains one of the most profound concerns of present day physics and cosmology. Are their any deep reasons for the observed asymmetry between matter and anti-matter? If so, what are they? What do scientists learn by banding birds? There is a great deal of interest in learning the migration pattern of birds. As you know, some birds travel thousands of kilometers each year, seeking breeding grounds suitable for raising their young, and then they travel back home. Banding enables subsequent recognition of individual birds; if you could identify the place where the bird came from and when it left, you would learn a great deal. If you band a large number of individuals, you can also find their varying preferences, as also the dangers and hazards they have to overcome on various routes and distances. These days, one can also put bands containing tiny transmitters and track the birds via satellite as they proceed on their journey. Why do our eyes close during sneezing? Let me try a commonsense answer. It is clear that while sneezing our body is trying to expel air through our nasal passages with an explosive force. In order to do that all the muscles around our face are asked to fasten seat belts and tighten up. No wonder then that the eyes are also closed shut. That is what we do to our doors and windows before a hurricane strikes.
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Keeping soldiers cool When people exercise, their muscles consume energy and generate heat as a byproduct. When enough heat accumulates internally, it can limit exercise performance. Two Stanford biologists have developed a method for cooling that maximises heat transfer through the palms of the hands. The idea is to engorge confluences of arteries and veins located there by mechanically drawing blood into them. The technology was used by some athletes during training for the Olympic Games in Athens, and it may soon find its way into attire for military personnel and others who work in extreme heat. “We literally cool the body from the inside out, rather than from the outside in, which is the conventional method,” explains Senior Research Scientist Dennis Grahn, who developed the cooling device with H. Craig Heller, the Lorry I. Lokey/Business Wire Professor in Human Biology and Environmental Biology. The device works by creating a local subatmospheric pressure environment, Grahn says. “We stick the hand in a rigid chamber with an airtight seal around the wrist, and then we draw a bit of the air out of the chamber,” he explains. “This causes blood to be pulled into the hand. Then we cool the overlying skin surface of the palm of the hand [by circulating cool water through a closed system on which the palm of the hand rests], which cools the blood in the hand’s vascular heat-exchange structures. Arteries deliver blood directly from the heart to these vascular structures, and veins then carry the blood from these structures back to the heart.” Carbon to rival nanotubes
Anyone who has written with a pencil may have unwittingly made a few traces of a promising new nanomaterial. Among the thick smears of graphite deposited when a pencil rubs along paper are probably some carbon films only a few atoms thick, says physicist Andre K. Geim of the University of Manchester in England. In laboratory experiments, he and his colleagues at Manchester and in Russia have now created freestanding carbon films as thin as one atom. The researchers call the surprising material “few-layer graphene.” In the Oct. 22 Science, the team also reports that it formed the material into a novel prototype transistor that’s expected to produce less heat than a conventional transistor does. Tailored bacteria
Chemists have designed bacteria that rely on a breakdown product of caffeine for their survival. The advance could eventually lead to decaffeinated coffee plants. Justin Gallivan, a chemist at Emory University in Atlanta, and Shawn Desai, also of Emory, provided bacteria with a molecular switch that senses the presence of theophylline - the caffeine by-product. In response, the switch activates a gene that renders the microbes resistant to an antibiotic. The genetic control that Gallivan designed is called a riboswitch, a segment of RNA that changes conformation when bound to certain small molecules and then turns genes on or off.
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