A revised set of National Ambient Air Quality Standards is sending mixed signals across the country. My neighbour asked me in the elevator last evening," Does it mean we are allowed to pollute as much as the industries do? Or will it mean industries will have to lower emissions to meet standards set for households?"

True to his style, India's environment and forests minister Jairam Ramesh has unveiled another set of 'path-breaking' rules after taking controversial stands on India's emissions and receding of the Himalayan glaciers.

"We have removed the distinction between industrial and residential areas. This is very important. Now standards will be uniform irrespective of whether it is classified as industrial or residential area," Ramesh said after making the fresh announcement. The new standards, in line with European Union norms, will promote clean fuel and that is expected to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Earlier rules allowed lower air quality in industrial areas compared to residential areas.

The usual peeve, as always, will be implementation. Though the Central Pollution Control Board and its sisters in the state have shown promise as capable implementing authorities, much can be said about their willingness and efficiency. Proactive, forward-thinking rules are always welcome, but is anyone listening?

The idea behind the project is brilliant -- telling stories to explain swine flu, asthma, cardiac arrest and hundreds of such medical conditions in the language of a ten year old. UK-based Medikidz comics will come to India with their glossy tales of the adventures of five superheroes in a make-believe land. The books are written and reviewed by doctors and will help parents, teachers and children basics of difficult to understand medical concepts.

I remember UNICEF's girl child Meena, parrot in tow, in comic books and animated films taking on tough issues such as HIV/AIDS in the south Asian region. Meena was a greatly inspiring example of communicating health and education even at the village level. Some time back I was thoroughly impressed with the work of Jean Pierre Petit, who uses comics in France (and now the rest of the world) to tell science stories.

Also India's Centre for Science and Environment's commendable publication 'Gobar Times' (Gobar is cow dung in Hindi) dejargonising environment issues for children.

I'm sure there are hundreds of lesser known publications that we must know about. I would love to hear of such regional and national publications that are successfully doing this relatively difficult job of taking science to children. Writing simply and effectively is the most challenging way of communicating and my respect goes to such publications who do this tirelessly, sometimes as an act bordering on philanthropy.

But first the details, and then a little more crib.

Among many such devices, Google Inc. is hoping to launch a new online service that will let readers buy electronic versions of books and read them on gadgets -- cell phones, laptops and possibly e-book devices. Google Editions will make millions of printed books available online, abiding by all copyright laws.

Google faces competition from Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle e-book reader and Sony Corp.'s new Reader Pocket Edition. Kindle weighs less than 300 grams and gets you a book to read within a minute. Sony's eBook Store includes more than 100,000 books, as well as a million free public-domain books available from Google. The Kindle Store currently has more than 330,000 available titles, according to an Associated Press report.

Indian bibliophiles will have to wait a while to be able to afford these 'lighter than the lightest paperback' devices. Or hope that someone kindles a flame here to develop an indigenous e-book reader! The latter sounds more like it, what with a country abounding in world-class software experts. Or maybe, we have an indigenous version already that has escaped my keen eye.

Global area coverage. © ISRO

Mosaic of Indian region. © ISRO

Northern and western India. © ISRO

ISRO said the three payloads on-board Oceansat-2 -- ocean colour monitor (OCM), scatterometer and radio occultation sounder (ROS) for atmospheric studies -- have been successfully turned on.

The OCM, a multi-spectral imaging radiometer, provides information on chlorophyll concentration and helps locate potential fisheries zones. The scatterometer, an active microwave sensor, facilitates retrieval of sea-surface wind speed and direction, and monitoring polar sea-ice. The ROS measures parameters pertaining to lower atmosphere and ionosphere.

The data provided by the different sensors on-board Oceansat -2, will also facilitate monitoring of turbidity and suspended sediments, sea-state and sea-surface winds, and meteorological/climatological studies. The satellite collects data over the entire globe once in two days.

Close on the heels of Chandrayaan's Moon water find, ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair has taken over as the President of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) headquartered in Paris. He is the first Indian space expert to be elected to the post. Among all the 25 Indian space missions under his tenure, the most significant was the successful launch of India’s first Moon mission Chandrayaan-1.

Madhavan Nair was the Vice-President of scientific activities of the IAA for the last four years. He is the recipient of two of India's biggest civilian honours Padma Vibhushan and Padma Bhushan.

His election as President of IAA recognises India's growing presence and expertise in space sciences and exploration. It also raises the bar for future ISRO missions.

IAA is an independent organisation of 1200 distinguished members from 85 countries elected by their peers for their outstanding contributions to astronautics and the exploration of space. It is the only international academy of elected members in the broad area of astronautics and space. IAA membership consists of individuals who have distinguished themselves in one of the fields of astronautics or one of the branches of science of fundamental importance for the exploration of space. The Academy has a strong scientific program this year with about 16 stand-alone conferences around the world.

© VBREC

The Gangetic Dolphin (Platanista gangetica) is to Ganges what the salmon has been to Thames. Only the comeaback of this lovely creature in desirable numbers can convince environmentalists that the 'Mission Clean Ganga' project has been a success, according to environment and forests minister Jairam Ramesh. Dophins can't be bred in captivity.

The fresh-water dolphin is found in rivers originating from the Himalayas.

I remember making a long journey to Bhagalpur in Bihar to have a look at them in the Ganges. Another time, I went looking for its cousin -- the Irrawaddy Dolphin (Orcaella brevirostris) -- in Orissa's Chilika lake, and came back absolutely thrilled after the rare sighting. The adorable wild creatures have a will of their own unlike captive dolphins (e.g. the pink ones in Sentosa Island of Singapore), who are trained to dance, play and talk.

India currently has around 2,300 Gangetic dolphins. The World Wide Fund for Nature says its population is declining at a rate of 10 per cent annually. The environment ministry's wish to replicate the 'salmon-Thames' success story with a Rs 15,000 crore project is laudable. It would be wonderful to see the dolphins back where they belong.

Thomson Reuters announced the 2009 Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates -- researchers likely to be in contention for Nobel honors -- just ahead of the real announcement from October 5-12. The organisation uses data from ISI Web of Knowledge, the world’s largest citation environment of the highest quality scholarly literature, to quantitatively determine the most influential researchers in the Nobel categories of Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, and Economics.

These high-impact researchers are predicted to be Nobel Prize winners, either this year or in the near future, based on the citation impact of their published research. Fifteen such predictions have come true in the last seven years. David Pendury, citation analyst at Thomson Reuters says they pick up possible candidates by assessing citation counts and the number of high-impact papers they have produced while identifying discoveries or themes that may be considered worthy of recognition by the Nobel Committee.

Professional awards, like the Nobel Prize, are largely a reflection of peer esteem. The 2009 predictions include:

Chemistry :

Michael Grätzel, Professor and Director, Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Laussane, Switzerland for his invention of dye-sensitized solar cells, now known as Grätzel cells.

Jacqueline K. Barton, Arthur and Marian Hanisch Memorial Professor of Chemistry and Chair of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering,California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., USA and Bernd Giese Professor, Department of Chemistry, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland and Gary B. Schuster, Provost and Professor, School of Chemistry, Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, Ga., USA for their pioneering research of electron charge transfer in DNA.

Benjamin List, Professor and Director, Max Planck Institute for Coal Research, Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany, and Honorary Professor, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany for his development of organic asymmetric catalysis using enamines.

Physics

Yakir Aharonov, Professor, Department of Physics, Computational Science and Engineering, Chapman University Orange, Calif., USA, Emeritus Professor, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel, University of South Carolina Columbia, S.C., USA and Sir Michael V. Berry, F.R.S., Melville Wills Professor of Physics Emeritus, Department of Physics, University of Bristol Bristol, United Kingdom for their discovery of the Aharonov-Bohm Effect and the related Berry Phase, respectively.

Juan Ignacio Cirac, Director of Theory Division, Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics Garching, Germany and Peter Zoller, Professor of Physics, Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Innsbruck and Scientific Director, Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Innsbruck, Austria for their pioneering research on quantum optics and quantum computing.

Sir John B. Pendry, F.R.S., Professor of Theoretical Solid State Physics and Head of the Condensed Matter Theory Group, Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, United Kingdom and Sheldon Schultz, Research Professor of Physics, Department of Physics, University of California San Diego San Diego, Calif., USA and David R. Smith, William Bevan Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Director of the Center for Metamaterial and Integrated Plasmonics, Duke University, Chapel Hill, N.C., USA for their prediction and discovery of negative refraction.

Physiology or Medicine

Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Morris Herztein Professor of Biology and Physiology, Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, Calif., USA and Carol W. Greider Daniel Nathans Professor and Director, Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Baltimore, Md., USA and Jack W. Szostak, Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School and Alexander Rich Distinguished Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital; also, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Boston, Mass., USA for their roles in the discovery of and pioneering research on telomeres and telomerases.

James E. Rothman, Wallace Professor of Biomedical Sciences, Professor and Chairman of Cell Biology, Professor of Chemistry, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., USA and Randy Schekman, Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology, University of California Berkeley; also, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, Berkeley, Ca., USA for their research on cellular membrane trafficking.

Seiji Ogawa, Director, Ogawa Laboratories for Brain Function Research, Hamano Life Science Research Foundation, Tokyo, Japan for his fundamental discoveries leading to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which has revolutionized basic research in brain science and diagnosis in clinical medicine.

More details and predictions for economics here.

Last week at the European Planetary Science Congress in Postdam, Germany, Manuel Grande, principal investigator of Chandrayaan-1's X-Ray Spectrometer (C1XS) made announcements on some interesting data India's lunar mission had gathered. During its 10 month long journey in outer space, Chandrayaan-1 gathered data for a total of 30 solar flares, giving the most accurate measurements to date of magnesium, aluminium, silicon, calcium and iron in the lunar surface.

© ISRO. A lovely picture of earth taken by Chandrayaan-1's terrain mapping camera way before it started gazing at the Moon.

Adding some vital pieces to the jigsaw of the mineralogy of the lunar surface, the C1XS instrument investigated the lunar surface using an effect whereby X-ray illumination from the Sun causes rocks to fluoresce, emitting light at a different wavelength. This re-emitted light contains spectral peaks that are characteristic of elements contained in the rock, revealing its composition. Solar flares acted like flash bulbs, giving added illumination and allowing C1XS to ‘see’ more elements.

Grande said the results will help us further our knowledge of the Moon and planetary formation. "We were able to separate clear peaks for each of the target elements, allowing us not only to identify where they are present but give an accurate estimate for how much is there. The technology developed for C1XS opens up some exciting opportunities for future missions,” he was quoted as saying in a release.

Here's hoping we will hear more earth shaking stories -- water or no water on the Moon -- soon!

Quick update: Looks like the water stories are absolutely right, after all. More coverage on Nature India .

© NASA

Colonel Edward Michael Fincke recently received public felicitation in Guwahati, the capital of Assam, in a function organised by Friends of Assam and Seven Sisters (FASS). Assam's illustrious son-in-law is married to Renita Saikia, who also works for NASA. Mike mama (maternal uncle), as he has come to be known in Assam, was Commander of the Expedition 18 mission to the International Space Station (ISS).

Earlier this year, this father of three children (called Chandra, Tarali & Surya -- moon, star and sun in Assamese) addressed Assamese students live from the ISS, answering their innocent queries on life in space and stoking their ambition to step into his shoes when they grow up.

In one of his missions, Mike carried an Assamese Gamosa (scarf) and famously performed the Assamese folk dance Bihu in zero gravity in the ISS. He clicked hundreds of pictures of the north eastern states and Assam's famous geographical landmark river Brahmaputra from space.

Now, that's a great way of cross cultural, trans-border popularisation of science! Wonder why the government hasn't yet utilised this avenue -- international marital ties -- to bring science to the grassroots in a big, concerted way.

The move comes close on the heels of the HRD ministry’s revolutionary measures to change the way this country has traditionally viewed education.

For starters, these institutes would cost the government close to Rs 2,350 crore and most of them have been planned in the north-eastern states, seemingly to make up for their gross shortage of professional tech schools in the region. So, next year on, if all goes well, we will have NITs in Manipur, Mizoram, Goa , Meghalaya, Nagaland, Sikkim, Pudducherry, Uttarakhand and Delhi.

These would join the list of 20 NITs already operational in the country.

This brings us back to a question debated on the Nature India forum for long – are more institutes the answer to the problems facing India’s science education. Is quantity the key or quality or none? Where is reform most needed?

Alongside this, the government also approved amendments to the Organs Transplantation Act. Now there would be stringent penalties on persons or hospitals violating the provisions. A relook at the regulations was long due, what with the blatant violations to the act and a thriving human organ trade in India.

‘India as Innovation Hub’, a seminar organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce (FICCI) in New Delhi this week saw the DST secretary T. Ramasami talk of India's diversity in the innovation ecosystem in devising simple, low-cost grassroots solutions. Also, why product innovation must co-exist with process innovation.

However, the government machinery alone is not enough to boost innovation of the kind being exhorted here.
Venture capitals need to take all this where it must reach.

As the Executive vice chair of the National Innovation Foundation Anil Gupta points out, the National Innovation Fund was created to build a national register of innovations, mobilise intellectual property protection, set up incubators for converting them into viable business opportunities and help in taking them to the nook and corners of the country. The innovation database includes information on plant variety, utilities and general machinery, farm implements, energy devices, agricultural and traditional knowledge practices, livestock management, herbal remedies, biodiversity examples, innovation concepts and ideas.

Experts at the seminar also called for creation of innovation clusters, more innovation leaders at all levels of the society, conversion of urgent needs like water, sanitation, accessible health care, education and poverty into national innovative projects and formation of an India Action Council for innovation.

The innovation buzz really seems to be getting the pride of place it deserves and how!

CTRI also reports a rise in registered trials from 148 in December 2008 to 235 in April 2009. As of now, about 100 trials are pending with registrants for modifications/clarifications, while 50 trials are awaiting approvals from the Drug Control General of India. Biomedical journals in India have also shown their faith in the registry pledging to publish papers of clinical trials only if they are registered.

The move to create the registry for India and a few neighbouring countries who don't have their own registries was to "re-establish public trust in clinical trial data" following unethical practices adopted by the pharmaceutical companies for monetary gains.

Looks like the much needed regulatory push to clinical trials in India is finally in place. Have all the ethical questions surrounding good clinical practice (GCP) compliance been answered?

Fitting epitaph to Einstein's light box

No idea if the theory of relativity has a clause to explain this or it was sheer coincidence that while physicists across the world were flipping through ‘Quantum’, their peers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) revealed newer aspects of Max Planck’s famous 1900 experiment on non-reflective objects –- the blackbodies. Manjit Kumar’s book has a fair share of Planck but is widely hyped as the book on the spat between two other titans –- Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein.

For those who get excited over the grandeur and mystique of one of the most debated realities of physics –- the ‘Quantum theory’ –- the book cruises past the lives and works of many old masters and young turks -– Ernest Rutherford, Prince Louis De Broglie, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrodinger and Arnold Sommerfield, to name a few.

And for the uninitiated, there’s plenty of insight into the rigours of doing science in an era when the "search for the absolute was the loftiest of all scientific activity" -- again a Planck quote. They threw theories to test themselves against hard experimental facts and went to great lengths to do so.

Sample this: Planck getting up in the middle of the night to post a note with the equation for the blackbody spectrum. Or this: Albert Einstein hurrying to work at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern in a plaid suit and a pair of worn out slippers with embroidered flowers in 1905. The same year saw the ‘patent slave’ publish four landmark papers, explaining the quantum, atom sizes, Brownian motion and relativity – transforming all physics in the years to come. He also found the time and energy that year to write 21 book reviews for the journal Annalen der Physik! A fifth paper, as an afterthought, had the all famous equation: E=mc2.

The comparison between Einstein and Bohr makes for interesting anecdotes. Like Einstein, Bohr the handsome Dane, did badly in the languages department at school but had an aptitude for maths and science. Unlike him, Bohr struggled to express himself in English. While on his honeymoon, Bohr wrote his paper on alpha particles dictating it to wife Margrethe as she corrected his English and put words to his random thoughts.

These brilliant nuggets take the book beyond an academic pursuit of the quantum atom, aptly described by Bohr as the triumph of mind over matter. And the liberal sprinkling of history –- the famous Solvay conference of 1930 (though putting the pictures and the vivid text side by side would have been a better idea) or the Nazi purge of German civil services when Planck met Hitler to ask him to spare the scientific community –- gives the right backdrop to the scientific drama unfolding in the 20th century.

The public play of the Einstein-Bohr conflict in The New York Times in 1935 is reassuring –- the more things change, the more they remain the same. The cheeky practice of advance publication of scientific announcements in the press is not new after all! The controversy began in the journal Nature when Bohr challenged Einstein over quantum mechanics with a promise by Bohr that a “fuller development of this argument will be given in an article to be published shortly in Physical Review.”

The book leaves the debate hanging –- towards the end of the ‘Quantum’ plot, Einstein dies at 112 Mercer Street, an address that goes on to become one of the most famous in the world, surrounded by portraits of Faraday, Maxwell and Gandhi. There he ‘hibernates’ till his death in 1937, which, incidentally, does not end the debate. In 1962, Bohr dies and the last drawing on the blackboard in his study replays the keenest of his arguments with Einstein –- that of Einstein’s celebrated light box.

Physicists across the world have not been able to avoid getting sucked into the quantum debate ever since, like Planck, who steered clear of the theory as much as he could but became the ‘reluctant revolutionary when he hinted about it first, “We have to live with the quantum theory," he said, "and believe me, it will expand."

There's nothing in the Montreal Protocol to regulate N2O. If N2O emissions are contained, it would be something to rejoice for scientists predicting that the depleted ozone layer might be able to heal itself faster. On a happy flip-side, it would also reduce humankind's contribution to climate change -- something the authors of the paper aptly describe as a ‘win-win’ for both ozone and climate.

Takes me back to 2006, when scientists from the small Bengal town of Serampore had challenged the Montreal and Kyoto Protocols. The low profile scientists had published their findings way back in 2000 in the Indian Journal of Physics claiming, in essence, the same thing as the Science paper -- that chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) is not the biggest demon, nitrous oxide is.The IPCC mentioned N2O only in the list of greenhouse gases relevant to radiative forcing and not in the list of ozone-depleting gases.

The lead author S. K. Midya of the department of physics at Serampore College in Hooghly district of West Bengal sent me a copy of the paper by post (the journal wasn't online then and even now doesn't seem to have online archives prior to 2001). He and his colleagues had analysed data from the Antarctic Survey Station Mc Murdo to show that 61.67 per cent to the depletion of the ozone layer was due to N2O, 27% due to carbon dioxide and 7% due to CFCs. The findings were questioned by several environment scientists at the time. Their contention was that scientists from Mc Murdo would have certainly reported these figures in a paper if this was the case.

The point of this post is: the questions being asked are the same all these years. But the answers remain as elusive as ever. Hope the Copenhagen meet in December takes some policy stand on this alongside all the other landmark discussions it is expected to witness.

Photo caption: The deer, the flying frog & the colour changing flower. Courtesy: WWF

Small wonder that such a treasure trove exists since the largely inaccessible landscape of the Eastern Himalayas remains unexplored. The difficult terrain makes it a Herculean task to plan and execute biological surveys.

Expeditions to the region have unraveled 244 plants, 16 amphibians, 16 reptiles, 14 fish, 2 birds and 2 mammals, and at least 61 new invertebrates. The finds are spread over the Himalayas in Bhutan, north-eastern India, northern Myanmar, Nepal and southern Tibet.

The region harbours a staggering array of species, says the 'New Species report': 10,000 plants, 300 mammals, 977 bird species, 176 reptiles, 105 amphibians and 269 freshwater fish. The Eastern Himalayas are also home to many of the remaining Bengal tigers and are the last bastion of the greater one-horned rhino.

The findings, WWF contends, come with a warning that this important hotspot of biological diversity is most at risk from climate change, what with rapid glacial water retreats. The organisation has urged governments attending the climate change talks in Copenhagen this December to commit industrialised countries to a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. It also suggests that the governments of Bhutan, India and Nepal, develop a shared three-country vision and a "unified conservation and sustainable development plan that ensures the connectivity of landscapes within the Eastern Himalayas, allowing for the free movement of wildlife across
political borders and combating illegal trade at a regional level."