Former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan joined the Bharat Jodo Yatra of Rahul Gandhi in Rajasthan on Wednesday as many celebrities have joined the 3,500-km long Yatra in the course of last 98 days. But Rajan was singled out first time when BJP’s IT Cell chief Amit Malviya said the former RBI governor “fancies” himself as the next Manmohan Singh.
Raghuram Rajan was the 23rd Governor of the RBI and served his term between 2013 and 2016. He joined Congress leader Rahul Gandhi during the Yatra on Wednesday, December 14. He was shown having a discussion with Rahul Gandhi while marching as the Congress’ yatra resumed from Bhadoti of Sawai Madhopur in Rajasthan this morning.
Soon after Congress tweeted about his participation stating, “BharatJodoYatra Shri Raghuram Rajan, former Governor of RBI, shaking steps with @RahulGandhi ji… The increasing number of people standing up to unite the country against hatred shows that we will be successful,” the debate on social media kicked off as he was known for his opposition to Demonetisation and other economic policies of the country.
Otherwise, several personalities ranging from joined the Bharat Jodo Yatra from activist Medha Patkar to actor Swara Bhaskar but did not evoke reaction the way Rajan’s participation did.
“Just that his commentary on India’s economy should be discarded with disdain. It is coloured and opportunistic,” Malviya tweeted. He was soon joined by BJP national general secretary CT Ravi who said Raghuram Rajan joined Rahul Gandhi’s yatra to “repay his debt” to the “dynasty” that had made him the RBI governor. “Raghu Ram Rajan was glorified as a great economist by the Liberals. But he turns out to be just another jewel in the court of the Fake Gandhis,” CT Ravi tweeted.
Rajan, with Lionel Barber (left) and Lloyd Blankfein (right), at the FT and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award ceremony in 2010.
As an internationally renowned economist, Rajan was averse to the risks of both unnecessary government intervention as well as unregulated financial markets. He advocated more freedom for financial markets in the economy. In his book, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists: Unleashing the Power of Financial Markets to Create Wealth and Spread Opportunity, he argued that deregulated financial markets facilitate access of the poor to finance and he was known for making the first move as RBI Governor who provided microfinance institutions become minibanks in the country for a greater financial inclusion.
He hols the view that “healthy and competitive financial markets are an extraordinarily effective tool in spreading opportunity and fighting poverty. ”
Known for his research work on banking and at IMF, Rajan early this year said even sanctions work as strongly as weapons of mass destruction. “When fully unleashed, sanctions, too, are weapons of mass destruction. They may not topple buildings or collapse bridges, but they destroy firms, financial institutions, livelihoods, and even lives. Like military WMDs, they inflict pain indiscriminately, striking both the culpable and the innocent,” he wrote in his article titled “Economic Weapons of Mass Destruction“, Project Syndicate.
Otherwie, the yatra will enter its 100th day on December 16 and move to Haryana next. The yatra started from Kanniyakumari on September 7 and has so far covered Tamil Nadu, Kerala, AP, Karnataka, Telangana, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. It will conclude in Jammu and Kashmir in early February 2023.
Here’s a video that is going viral today on Twitter by Bahar Ke Kalesh that has garnered over 4.7 million views with over hundreds of likes. It shows how a girl in a white t-shirt is seen interacting with another and the second girl blows a punch on her face.
Annoyed, the girl turned violent and started hitting the other girl and brings her down to the ground. While the two are engaged in their fight, a third girl enters in between and gets hurt.
them and joins to take down the attacking girl. However, with her strength, the violent girl took down both of them and keeps on hitting them. It ended when a college authority interrupted them. Watch it:
The sudden disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 on March 8, 2014 was a deliberate attempt to crash the plane, said a report by The Independent, citing the discovery of a landing gear door of the ill-fated plane by a Madagascar fisherman. It further, suggested that the pilot “deliberately downed” the aircraft resulting in the loss of lives of all 239 passengers onboard.
The report said the gear door, found at the home of a fisherman named Tataly 25 days ago, was the material evidence that explains how the pilot “intended to destroy” the plane. It quoted British engineer Richard Godfrey and an American MH370 wreckage hunter Blaine Gibson to support the claim.
“The level of damage with fractures on all sides and the extreme force of the penetration right through the debris item lead to the conclusion that the end of the flight was in a high-speed dive designed to ensure the aircraft broke up into as many pieces as possible. The crash of MH370 was anything but a soft landing on the ocean,” Godfrey was quoted as saying.
File photo of MH370; A Madagascar fisherman found door gear of MH370, shows new evidence
In 2017, the fisherman found the landing gear door that washed ashore after the tropical storm Fernando and kept it with him for five years without knowing its significance, while his wife used it as a washing board.
“The combination of the high speed impact designed to break up the aircraft and the extended landing gear designed to sink the aircraft as fast as possible both show a clear intent to hide the evidence of the crash,” Independent quoted a report published by the experts as saying.
How MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014?
The Beijing-bound MH370 disappeared off the radar about 40 minutes after take-off from Kuala Lumpur on the fateful night of March 8, 2014 when its communication systems were switched off and the flight changed the route into the southern Indian Ocean.
The probe concluded that the plane crashed in a remote area of about 232,000 kilometers off the sea bed. So far, some suspected fragments of the aircraft have been recovered from beaches in Reunion, Mozambique, Mauritius, South Africa, and Pemba Island (Zanzibar).
Malaysia, Australia, and China, who carried out the first search at a cost of over $151 million, suspended the probe in January 2017. even the US-based seabed exploration company Ocean Infinity, which conducted a second search, yielded no result.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday called for de-escalating the India-China border tensions after reports of army clashes in Arunachal Pradesh.
His spokesperson Stephane Guterres said: “We call for de-escalation to ensure that the tensions along the border in that area do not grow.”
India’s Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said that on Friday a physical scuffle took place between the armies of the two countries in the Yangtse area of the Tawang sector in Arunachal Pradesh.
Both sides suffered minor injuries and Indian troops turned back China’s incursion, he said.
The two nations’ troops commanders in the region met on Sunday and the matter has also been taken up with China through diplomatic channels, he said.
Following border clashes between India and China at Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh, the US said that it “strongly opposes” any unilateral attempt to advance territorial claims.
US State Department spokesperson Ned Price told reporters at the daily briefing that the US is “closely” monitoring the situation along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in the aftermath of clashes and is in “close contact” with its Indian “partners”.
Price declined to detail conversations with India but stated, “We are glad to hear that both sides appear to have quickly disengaged from the clashes,” Price said and went on to appeal to the two countries to discuss their boundary disputes utilising the existing bilateral channels.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre also expressed similar sentiments. “We are glad to hear that both sides appear to have quickly disengaged from the clashes. We are closely monitoring the situation. We encourage India and China to utilise existing bilateral channels to discuss disputed boundaries,” she said.
Price was responding to questions about clashes between contingents of the Indian Army and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the Tawang sector last week.
The Chinese soldiers, numbering about 300, came armed with tasers, knuckle dusters and other weapons – but not guns as per a bilateral pact not to use arms in the border. The Indian side deployed reinforcements and “compelled” them to return to their posts, said the Indian defence minister.
The largely unmarked LAC has seen several such clashes, of late with Galwan in Ladakh region in 2020 when 20 Indian soldiers were injured at the time and many Chinese soldiers too killed or injured.
Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Indian American member of the House of Representatives, expressed concern over the clashes and said, “I’m disturbed to learn of the latest show of aggression by the Chinese Communist Party through its violation of Indian territory with its armed forces.”
He said the clashes are a reminder of the growing belligerence of the Chinese Communist Party and the need for the United States to continue to work with India in the region to counter Beijing’s aggression.
The incident on Dec 9, 2022 happened when Chinese troops in Yangtse in the Tawang sector in Arunachal Pradesh clashed with three different battalions — Jammu and Kashmir Rifles, Jat regiment and Sikh Light Infantry — were present at the location in a bid to change the status quo in the border territory.
The update shows that there is 67% increase in Medical Colleges from 387 to 648 or 87% increase in MBBS seats from 51,348 to 96,077 and 105% increase in PG seats from 31,185 to 64,059. Currently, there are 22 AIIMS approved with 19 AIIMS of them having undergraduate courses.
A total of 96,077 MBBS seats are available in the country out of which 51,712 in Government Medical Colleges and 44365 in Private Medical Colleges. There are 49,790 PG seats of National Medical Commission (NMC) available in the country, out of which 30,384 in Government Medical Colleges and 19,406 in Private Medical Colleges.
There are also 12,648 Diplomate of National Board (DNB) / Fellowship of National Board (FNB) PG seats out of which 4185 in Government institutions and 8463 in Private institutions. In addition, 1621 PG seats are in College of Physicians and Surgeons (CPS), said a statement.
There is an increase of 67% in Medical Colleges from 387 before 2014 to 648 as of now. Further, there is an increase of 87% in MBBS seats from 51,348 before 2014 to 96,077 as of now and increase of 105% in PG seats from 31,185 before 2014 to 64,059 as of now. The measures/steps taken by the Government to increase the opportunities for medical studies and expansion of medical education in the Country include: –
Central Sector Scheme for establishment of new medical college by upgrading district/ referral hospital under which 94 new medical colleges are already functional out of 157 approved.
Central Sector Scheme for strengthening/ upgradation of existing State Government/Central Government Medical Colleges to increase MBBS and PG seats.
Central Sector Scheme for “Upgradation of Government Medical Colleges by construction of Super Specialty Blocks”. A total of 60 projects are complete out of 75 approved.
Under the Central Sector Scheme for setting up of new AIIMS, 22 AIIMS have been approved. Undergraduate courses have started in 19 of these.
Relaxation in the norms for setting up of Medical College in terms of requirement for faculty, staff, bed strength and other infrastructure.
DNB qualification has been recognized for appointment as faculty to take care of shortage of faculty.
Enhancement of age limit for appointment/ extension/ re-employment against posts of teachers/Dean/Principal/ Director in medical colleges upto 70 years.
As per information received from the State Government of Madhya Pradesh, the State in order to promote education in regional languages has taken a decision to impart medical education in Hindi as a pilot project.
The Union Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare, Dr. Bharati Pravin Pawar stated this in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha today.
Amid border incursions with the Chinese soldiers coming with barbed sticks near the LAC on December 9, satellite images show that China has built villages on their side. As per a bilateral pact, weapons are not to be borne by soldiers on the border.
Along the India-China border abutting Arunachal Pradesh’s Tawang, the PLA army has also constructed a road, Indian Army sources told media on Tuesday, a day after a clash between troops of both sides last week became public.
On the clash, sources said that as many as 300 Chinese troops had arrived near the LAC on December 9 to gain control over the peak of a 17,000-feet-high mountain but the Indian troops foiled their attempt, the source said.
Meanwhile, China’s first statement on the clash has come, with its Foreign Ministry said that the situation on its border with India is “stable”. Responding to reports of clash between Indian and Chinese soldiers on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) near Tawang, China maintained that the situation on the border is stable.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said: “As far as we understand, the situation on the China-India border is overall stable. Continuous talks are going on, on the border issue through diplomatic and military channels.”
Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh on Tuesday told Parliament that Indian troops successfully thwarted an attempt by Chinese soldiers to transgress the LAC in Arunachal Pradesh’s Tawang sector.
In a statement which the Defence Minister read out in both Houses of Parliament, he said that Indian troops in a brave and resolute manner pushed back the Chinese troops back to their positions after a physical scuffle, in which minor injuries were suffered by both sides in Yangtse area of Tawang sector.
However no fatalities were reported on the Indian side during the incident, Rajnath Singh informed the House. He said that subsequently a flag meeting between Indian and Chinese commanders was held on December 11, where the Chinese side was told to refrain from such actions and maintain peace and tranquility along the border.
The matter has also been taken up through diplomatic channels with China. Rajnath Singh expressed confidence that the House stands united in supporting Indian soldiers in their efforts as the Lok Sabha witnessed a pandemonium when he read out the statement.
Earlier in the day, Rajnath Singh had chaired a high-level emergency meeting with CDS Lieutenant General Anil Chauhan, Army chief General Manoj Pande and NSA Ajit Doval.
Congress leader Shashi Tharoor said, “No doubt that China has its eyes on Tawang. We’ve to be very alert there. I think what our Army did yesterday had the support of entire country.”
The clash between Indian and Chinese troops on December 9 took place at the 17,000 feet at Yangtse, some 35 km north-east of Tawang in western Arunachal Pradesh.
A source informed that there have been injuries to both Indian and Chinese soldiers and six of the injured Indian soldiers had been admitted to the military hospital at Guwahati, but here is no reports of any serious injury or death.
China has been repeatedly trying to take control of the 17,000-feet-high peak but Indian Army sources said that India has a firm control of the peak, which provides a commanding view on both sides of the border. Currently, Indian Air Force aircraft are patrolling the skies of Arunachal.
As the winter is setting in, the Delhi government is taking up the Winter Action Plan to rescue the homeless from the chill and provide them accommodation and food in ‘Rain Baseras’.
Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia on Tuesday reviewed the plan with senior officials of various departments concerned. The Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DSUIB) has set up 15 rescue teams, each equipped with a vehicle, for surveillance and rescuing homeless people.
The Delhi government has also set up a 24×7 centralised control room and issued helpline numbers to join Rain Basera or night shelter.
To ensure that no one is left out in the cold during the peak winter season, the government has established food and lodging facilities for homeless people across 195 shelter homes which have the capacity of accommodating over 17,000 people, said Sisodia.
An official said that people can inform the DUSIB about the homeless through this helpline and DUSIB’s rescue team will reach the location to take the homeless to the nearest shelter.
About the night shelter facility, Sisodia said: “The Delhi government is determined to provide a dignified life to every person residing in the capital, including homeless people.
He also said that the government is planning to increase the capacity of these shelters, if needed, in the winter.
The DUSIB officials are responsible for managing the night shelter facility across the capital primarily, along with the existing facilities of food, lodging and medical care at the ‘Rain Baseras’.
So far, over 1,500 homeless people have been rescued by these teams in the past few weeks. Out of total 195 night shelters for homeless people in Delhi, 19 are for families, 17 for women, four for drug addicts, and three are recovery shelters.
Sky watchers can witness a meteor shower peaking between Tuesday night and well into the early hours of Wednesday, Dec 12-13 night as the Geminid meteor shower comes around this time of the year when several meteoroids, left behind by ‘rock comet’ 3200 Phaethon, enter the earth’s atmosphere.
While Bengaluru-based Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium is organising an event to watch the night sky with naked eye between 10pm tonight till 4:30am Wednesday under expert advice and supervision after paying Rs. 500 per head, the winter night has become suddenly cloudy by evening that many may be left disappointed.
Following the Cyclone Mandous in Chennai and Andhra Pradesh coast, Bengaluru is under constant spell of rain in the last four days and the morning Sun soon disappeared on Wednesday.
However, people in other ares with clear sky can see meteors unless hindered by pollution and a cloudy sky, with a bright moon to add to that. However, if you are in luck, you will be able to observe around 30 to 40 meteors lighting up the night sky each hour, especially between 2am and 3am. Telescopes are not necessary for this event as they limit the view of the sky.
In a massive show of anger, more than 80 political parties and social organisations staged a silent march in Pune on Tuesday to protest the repeated slurs on Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj.
Several major areas of the city, including wholesale markets observed a shutdown and more than two lakh protesters joined the march sporting saffron flags, black banners and posts, demanding the removal of Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari for his recent utterances vilifying great icons of the state.
Maha Vikas Aghadi members Congress, Shiv Sena-UBT, Nationalist Congress Party, around three dozen Maratha, Shiv Premi and Muslim organisations, the royal descendent Chhatrapati Udayanraje Bhosale and a large number of women walked in the silent march from Deccan to Lal Mahal areas of the city.
However, the ruling Balasahebanchi Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party and Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena kept off the protest demonstration, where a massive police contingent of over 7,500 personnel was deployed to ward off any untoward incidents.
Bhosale questions
Shivaji’s descendent Bhosale asked the media that when Nupur Sharma (who made derogatory remarks on the Prophet Mohammed in May) was removed by the party, what prevented it from ousting the Governor for his utterances against the Chhatrapati, and initiating action against all others who keep making derogatory comments on icons which hurt public sentiments.
MVA’s leaders in the procession included Shiv Sena-UBT Deputy Leader Dr. Raghunath Kuchik, Sushma Andhare, Sena-UBT city chief Sanjay More, NCP’s city President Prashant Jagtap, office-bearers Rupali Patil, Deepak Mankar and Ankush Kakde, Ajinkya Palkar, Congress city chief Ramesh Bagwe, office-bearers Arvind Shinde, Sangeeta Tiwari, Mohan Joshi, Balasaheb Dabhekar, and the Sambhaji Brigade was represented by Santosh Shinde, Vikas Pasalkar, and Prashant Dhumal.
Other major groups which joined were the CPI, Maratha Mahasangh, Dalit Panthers, RPI, Aam Aadmi Party, Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi, over two dozen non-political, social, business organisations, youths, women and Muslim front groups.
Bhagat Singh Koshiyari
The MVA leaders have rejected the Governor’s letter (December 6) clarifying his position to Union Home Minister Amit Shah, and insisted that he had not apologised for his remarks against Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj or Mahatma Jyotirao Phule, hence he has lost the moral right to continue in his post.
Among other things in his letter, Koshyari said that he “cannot even dream” of insulting the great personalities as contended and sought Shah’s “guidance” in the matter.
The state has been rocked by a series of agitations and protests against the Governor for his recent utterances that have irked the state polity and top leaders also objected to him sharing the stage with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Nagpur on Sunday.
Besides the Governor, other BJP leaders like state ministers Chandrakant Patil, Mangal Prabhat Lodha, Union Minister Raosaheb Danve, have been accused of making objectionable statements against the state’s icons.
To save the northern white rhinoceros from extinction, the BioRescue team is racing to create lab-grown egg and sperm cells of the critically endangered subspecies. The team has now reported a milestone in Science Advances: they have generated primordial germ cells from stem cells – a world’s first.
Thirty-three-year-old Najin and her daughter Fatu are the last surviving northern white rhinos on the planet. They live together in a wildlife conservancy in Kenya. With just two females left, this white rhino subspecies is no longer capable of reproduction – at least not on its own. But all hope is not lost: according to a paper published in the journal Science Advances, an international team of researchers has successfully cultivated primordial germ cells (PGCs) – the precursors of rhino eggs and sperm – from embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).
The last two surviving females live in the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya./CREDIT:Jan Stejskal, Safari Park Dvůr Králové
This represents a major milestone in an ambitious plan. The BioRescue project, which is coordinated by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) and has been funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) since 2019, wants to save the northern white rhino from extinction. To this end, the scientists are pursuing two strategies – one of them trying to generate viable sperm and eggs from the skin cells of deceased rhinos. The idea is to implant the resulting embryos into closely related southern white rhino females, who will then carry the surrogate offspring to term. And so the northern white rhino subspecies, which humans have already effectively wiped out through poaching, may yet be saved thanks to state-of-the-art stem cell and reproductive technologies.
First success with an endangered species
To get from a piece of skin to a living rhinoceros may be a true feat of cellular engineering, but the process itself is not unprecedented: the study’s co-last author Professor Katsuhiko Hayashi leads research labs at the Japanese universities of Osaka and Kyushu in Fukuoka, where his teams have already accomplished this feat using mice. But for each new species, the individual steps are uncharted territory. In the case of the northern white rhinoceros, Hayashi is working in close cooperation with Dr. Sebastian Diecke’s Pluripotent Stem Cells Technology Platform at the Max Delbrück Center and with reproduction expert Professor Thomas Hildebrandt from Leibniz-IZW. The two Berlin-based scientists are also co-last authors of the current study.
“This is the first time that primordial germ cells of a large, endangered mammalian species have been successfully generated from stem cells,” explains the study’s first author, Masafumi Hayashi of Osaka University. Previously, it has only been achieved in rodents and primates. Unlike in rodents, the researchers have identified the SOX17 gene as a key player in rhinoceros PGC induction. SOX17 also plays an essential role in the development of human germ cells – and thus possibly in those of many mammalian species.
The southern white rhino embryonic stem cells being used in Japan come from the Avantea laboratory in Cremona, Italy, where they were grown by Professor Cesare Galli’s team. The newly derived northern white rhino PGCs, meanwhile, originated from the skin cells of Fatu’s aunt, Nabire, who died in 2015 at Safari Park Dvůr Králové in the Czech Republic. Diecke’s team at the Max Delbrück Center was responsible for converting them into induced pluripotent stem cells.
Next step: cell maturation
Masafumi Hayashi says that they are hoping to use the cutting-edge stem cell technology from Katsuhiko Hayashi’s lab to save other endangered rhino species: “There are five species of rhino, and almost all of them are classified as threatened on the IUCN Red List.” The international team also used stem cells to grow PGCs of the southern white rhino, which has a global population of around 20,000 individuals. In addition, the researchers were able to identify two specific markers, CD9 and ITGA6, that were expressed on the surface of the progenitor cells of both white rhino subspecies. “Going forward, these markers will help us detect and isolate PGCs that have already emerged in a group of pluripotent stem cells,” Hayashi explains.
The BioRescue scientists must now move on to the next difficult task: maturing the PGCs in the laboratory to turn them into functional egg and sperm cells. “The primordial cells are relatively small compared to matured germ cells and, most importantly, still have a double set of chromosomes,” explains Dr. Vera Zywitza from Diecke’s research group, who was also involved in the study. “We therefore have to find suitable conditions under which the cells will grow and divide their chromosome set in half.”
Genetic variation is key for conservation
Leibniz-IZW researcher Hildebrandt is also pursuing a complementary strategy. He wants to obtain egg cells from 22-year-old Fatu and fertilize them in Galli’s lab in Italy using frozen sperm collected from four now deceased northern white rhino bulls. This sperm is thawed and injected into the egg in a process known as intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). However, Hildebrandt explains that Fatu is not able to bear her own offspring, as she has problems with her Achilles tendons and cannot carry any additional weight. Her mother Najin, meanwhile, is past child-bearing age and also suffers from ovarian tumors. “And in any case, since we only have one donor of natural eggs left, the genetic variation of any resulting offspring would be too small to create a viable population,” he adds.
The team’s top priority, therefore, is turning the PGCs they now have at their disposal into egg cells. “In mice, we found that the presence of ovarian tissue was important in this crucial step,” Zywitza explains. “Since we cannot simply extract this tissue from the two female rhinos, we will probably have to grow this from stem cells as well.” The scientist is hopeful, however, that ovarian tissue from horses could come in useful, as horses are among the rhinos’ closest living relatives from an evolutionary standpoint. If only humans had taken as good care of the wild rhino as they had of the domesticated horse, the immense challenge now facing the BioRescue scientists could perhaps have been avoided altogether.
A fast, needle-free malaria detection tool developed by a University of Queensland-led team could help save hundreds of thousands of lives annually.
Malaria is usually detected by a blood test, but scientists have devised a method using a device that shines a beam of harmless infrared light on a person’s ear or finger for five-to-10 seconds, it collects an infrared signature that is processed by a computer algorithm.
International team leader, Dr Maggy Lord from UQ’s School of Biological Sciences, said the technology would revolutionise how malaria is fought globally.
The malaria detection tool collects an infrared signature for a mobile phone to process./CREDIT:The University of Queensland
“Currently it’s incredibly challenging to test large groups of people, such as the population of a village or town – you have to take blood from everyone and mix it with a reagent to get a result,” Dr Lord said.
“But with this tool we can find out very quickly whether a whole village or town is suffering from, or carrying, malaria.
“The technique is chemical-free, needle-free and detects malaria through the skin using infrared-light – it’s literally just a flash on a person’s skin and it’s done.
“The device is smart-phone operated, so results are acquired in real time.”
The researchers believe the technology is the first step to eliminating malaria.
Tiger Mosquito of Asia is adaing to survive the state of Illinois’s harsh winters / CREDIT: JAMES GATHANY/CDC
“According to the World Health Organisation malaria report, in 2020 there were an estimated 241 million cases worldwide and more than 600,000 died from malaria,” Dr Lord said.
“Most of the cases are in sub-Saharan Africa, where 90 per cent of deaths are children under five years old.
“The biggest challenge in eliminating the disease is the presence of asymptomatic people in a population who act as a reservoir for transmission by mosquitos.
“The World Health Organisation has proposed large-scale surveillance in endemic areas and this non-invasive, affordable and rapid tool offers a way to achieve that.”
The technology could also help tackle other diseases.
“We’ve successfully used this technology on mosquitoes to non-invasively detect infections such as malaria, Zika and dengue,” Dr Lord said.
“In our post-COVID world, it could be used to better tackle diseases as people move around the globe.
“We hope the tool could be used at ports of entry to screen travellers, minimising the re-introduction of diseases and reducing global outbreaks.
“It’s still early days, but this proof-of-concept is exciting.”
UQ collaborated with the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, Brazil, led by Dr Rafael Maciel de Freitas, who applied the tool to detect malaria in patients in the Amazon region.
The work was funded by Fiocruz INOVA Ideias Inovadoras, Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro and by Advance Queensland Industry Research Fellowship and the National Health and Medical Research Council.
Based on genome sequence data from six individuals excavated from the base of a medieval well at a site in Norwich, UK, a revised radiocarbon analysis of the assemblage has been prepared with these individuals being part of a historically attested episode of antisemitic violence on 6 February 1190 CE.
Researchers found that four of these individuals were closely related and all six have strong genetic affinities with modern Ashkenazi Jews. They identified four alleles associated with genetic disease in Ashkenazi Jewish populations and infer variation in pigmentation traits, including the presence of red hair.
“Simulations indicate that Ashkenazi-associated genetic disease alleles were already at appreciable frequencies, centuries earlier than previously hypothesized, they wrote. These findings provide new insights into a significant historical crime, into Ashkenazi population history, and into the origins of genetic diseases associated with modern Jewish populations.
After March 1349, the Jewish community of Erfurt was wiped out in a pogrom when the archbishop of Mainz, who had granted Jews the right to live and work in the medieval German city, tried the pogrom’s ringleaders, local merchants and city council members who owed money to Jewish money lenders. The city’s Christian population was forced to pay restitution.
Five years later, a new Jewish community took root in the narrow, winding streets and by 1354, the city funded new houses and a synagogue, drawing Jews from across Europe to Erfurt. “That must have convinced them it would never happen again,” says Karin Sczech, an archaeologist who works for the city.
For 100 years, Erfurt’s Jews flourished. In 1454, the town council revoked the rights of Erfurt’s Jewish population, forcing them to leave town. The city built a granary on top of their cemetery, destroying hundreds of graves and repurposing Jewish tombstones to build its stout stone walls, reports said.
Before the remains were reburied last year at a nearby cemetery, their DNA was extracted and it showed the origins of the Ashkenazim, the major Jewish population that emerged in Germany in the Middle Ages and later expanded into central and Eastern Europe.
The latest study on DNA from the six individuals from the Middle Ages unearthed in Norwich offers clues to where the Ashkenazim came from centuries earlier, and what happened along the way. The studies confirm that today’s Ashkenazi Jewish population, which numbers more than 10 million people spread around the world, has roots in about a few hundred who survived a population bottleneck in Europe more than 1000 years ago.
The Erfurt study, which appears today in Cell, is the first major study of a medieval Jewish population from a genetic perspective. “We just got a really nice angle from genetic resources that we didn’t have before,” says Elisheva Baumgarten, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who was not involved with the study. “The cumulative evidence can tell us more than history alone—that to me is the really exciting part.”
The mystery remains: Were the Jews of Erfurt belong to the Roman era? Or were they the descendants of some pioneers who crossed the Alps around 800 C.E. to found tight-knit communities along the Rhine, near modern-day Frankfurt?
“Ashkenazi Jews emerge in the Rhineland as migrants,” says Leonard Rutgers, a historian at Utrecht University and a co-author on the Cell paper. “But if they came from elsewhere, where did they come from?”
“Whether they’re from Israel or New York, the Ashkenazi population today is homogenous genetically,” says Hebrew University geneticist Shai Carmi.
An Orthodox rabbi approved plans to sample loose teeth, but not bones, from Jewish graves.KEITH PRUFER
Earlier, Carmi was pessimistic about studying DNA from ancient Jews. “I thought this would be impossible,” he says, “because there would be no permission to sample.” Searching for ancient DNA for analysis would mean grinding up tiny bits of bone for sequencing. Destructive sampling would also be needed for radiocarbon dating. “It’s a hard rule in Judaism that you don’t disturb the dead,” says Alexander Nachama, chief rabbi of the Jewish Community of Thuringia and head of the modern-day Jewish community in Erfurt.
Carmi pressed ahead, contacting historians and archaeologists in Europe to see whether suitable samples existed. “The historians thought I was crazy,” Carmi says. But a few got back to him—including Sczech, who had received rabbinical permission to measure bones from the Erfurt cemetery to determine their sex and ages at death, techniques that don’t harm the skeletal material. Carmi was able to sample the loose teeth of 38 individuals from the cemetery before the bodies were reburied in a 2021 ceremony.
The DNA results from Norwich and Erfurt both confirm that modern Ashkenazim are descended from a small founding population. Based on modern Jewish DNA, some researchers had speculated this founder group emerged from a population crunch in the 13th and 14th centuries, when the religious fervor of the Crusades and false accusations that Jews spread the Black Death sparked violent pogroms. But the new data point to a different scenario that played out earlier.
In the Norwich individuals—which DNA shows included three sisters and a young boy with red hair and blue eyes—geneticists found the same disease markers seen in modern Ashkenazi populations, at about the same frequencies.
At the same time, small differences among the dozens of Erfurt genomes suggested medieval Ashkenazi communities weren’t completely homogeneous, despite the earlier bottleneck.
That mixture of east and west “is exactly what we get from the genetic results,” Sczech says: After first branching out from a single, small founding population into small communities across Europe, including medieval Great Britain, the medieval Ashkenazim apparently mixed back together in places like Erfurt generations later.
The role of Jews as bankers, craftspeople, traders, and money lenders would have put them in constant contact with their Christian neighbors. In Erfurt, as in many medieval cities, synagogues, ritual baths, and Jewish houses were in the heart of town, right next to the city hall and at the intersection of two major roads.
Archival records show Jews and Christians went into business together and Christians served as wet-nurses to Jewish children. “Jews and Christians were constantly in each others’ lives. But it looks like they didn’t have children together,” Baumgarten says. “We as modern people don’t have the words to describe that complex sense of belonging.”
“It’s fair to say Jewish history is one big sequence of bottlenecks,” Rutgers says. But the Erfurt data suggests a brighter possibility: that long before the Erfurt Jews were laid to rest, somewhere in Europe a few dozen people flourished, passing their genes and culture to millions of people living today despite a history of brutal persecution.
A 5.2-magnitude earthquake jolted Dhaka on Monday, with the epicentre at 520 km away from Agargaon Seismic Centre in Dhaka at 9:02 a.m., according to athe Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD).
Kazi Zebunnesa, a meteorologist from BMD, told media that the epicentre of the earthquake was at a depth of 10 km in the Bay of Bengal and the reports of casualty and damage are still expected to be reported.
Bangladesh, which sits in a seismic zone, is prone to tremors.
Stone’s remarkable tenure on NASA’s longest-operating mission spans decades of historic discoveries and firsts.
Edward Stone has retired as the project scientist for NASA’s Voyager mission a half-century after taking on the role. Stone accepted scientific leadership of the historic mission in 1972, five years before the launch of its two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Under his guidance, the Voyagers explored the four giant planets and became the first human-made objects to reach interstellar space, the region between the stars containing material generated by the death of nearby stars.
Until now, Stone was the only person to have served as project scientist for Voyager, maintaining his position even while serving as director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California from 1991 to 2001. JPL manages the Voyager mission for NASA. Stone retired from JPL in 2001 but continued to serve as the mission’s project scientist.
“It has been an honor and a joy to serve as the Voyager project scientist for 50 years,” Stone said. “The spacecraft have succeeded beyond expectation, and I have cherished the opportunity to work with so many talented and dedicated people on this mission. It has been a remarkable journey, and I’m thankful to everyone around the world who has followed Voyager and joined us on this adventure.”
Edward Stone, second from left, and other members of the Voyager team pose with a model of the spacecraft in 1977, the year the twin probes launched. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Linda Spilker will succeed Stone as Voyager’s project scientist as the twin probes continue to explore interstellar space. Spilker was a member of the Voyager science team during the mission’s flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. She later became project scientist for NASA’s now-retired Cassini mission to Saturn, and rejoined Voyager as deputy project scientist in 2021.
Jamie Rankin, a research scientist at Princeton University and a member of the Voyager science steering group, has been appointed deputy project scientist for the mission. Rankin received her Ph.D. in 2018 from Caltech, where Stone served as her advisor. Her research combines data from Voyager and other missions in NASA’s heliophysics fleet.
The twin Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977, on a mission to explore Jupiter and Saturn, ultimately revealing never-before-seen features of those planets and their moons. Voyager 1 continued its journey out of the solar system, while Voyager 2 continued on to Uranus and Neptune – and remains the only spacecraft to have visited the ice giants.
Edward Stone, left, talks to reporters at a news conference to announce findings from Voyager 2’s flyby of Uranus in 1986. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Following this “grand tour” of the outer planets, the Voyager Interstellar Mission began. The goal was to exit the heliosphere – a protective bubble created by the Sun’s magnetic field and outward flow of solar wind (charged particles from the Sun). Voyager 1 crossed the boundary of the heliosphere and entered interstellar space in 2012, followed by Voyager 2 (traveling slower and in a different direction) in 2018. Today, as part of NASA’s longest-running mission, both spacecraft continue to illuminate the interplay between our Sun, and the particles and magnetic fields in interstellar space.
“Ed likes to say that Voyager is a mission of discovery, and it certainly is,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager. “From the flybys of the outer planets in the 1970s and ’80s, to the heliopause crossing and current travels through interstellar space, Voyager never ceases to surprise and amaze us. All those milestones and successes are due to Ed’s exceptional scientific leadership and his keen ability to share his excitement about these discoveries to the world.”
Among the many honors bestowed on him, Stone has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1984. He was awarded the National Medal of Science from President George H.W. Bush in 1991. When Stone was interviewed on the late-night TV show “The Colbert Report” in 2013, NASA arranged for host Stephen Colbert to present him with the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the agency’s highest honor for a nongovernment individual. In 2019, he received the Shaw Prize in Astronomy from the Shaw Foundation in Hong Kong for his work on the Voyager mission.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope was specially designed to detect the faint infrared light from very distant galaxies and give astronomers a glimpse at the early universe. The nature of galaxies during this early period of our universe is not well known nor understood. But with the help of gravitational lensing by a cluster of galaxies in the foreground, faint background galaxies can be magnified and also appear multiple times in different parts of the image.
Today, we sit down with three astronomers working on Webb to talk about their latest findings. The team members are Dan Coe of AURA/STScI for the European Space Agency and the Johns Hopkins University; Tiger Hsiao of the Johns Hopkins University; and Rebecca Larson of the University of Texas at Austin. These scientists have been observing the distant galaxy MACS0647-JD with Webb, and they’ve found something interesting.
Dan Coe: I discovered this galaxy MACS0647-JD 10 years ago with the Hubble Space Telescope. At the time, I’d never worked on high redshift galaxies, and then I found this one that was potentially the most distant at redshift 11, about 97 percent of the way back to the big bang. With Hubble, it was just this pale, red dot. We could tell it was really small, just a tiny galaxy in the first 400 million years of the universe. Now we look with Webb, and we’re able to resolve TWO objects! We’re actively discussing whether these are two galaxies or two clumps of stars within a galaxy. We don’t know, but these are the questions that Webb is designed to help us answer.
Tiger Yu-Yang Hsiao: You can also see that the colors between the two objects are so different. One’s bluer; the other one is redder. The blue gas and the red gas have different characteristics. The blue one actually has very young star formation and almost no dust, but the small, red object has more dust inside, and is older. And their stellar masses are also probably different.
It’s really interesting that we see two structures in such a small system. We might be witnessing a galaxy merger in the very early universe. If this is the most distant merger, I will be really ecstatic!
Dan Coe: Due to the gravitational lensing of the massive galaxy cluster MACS0647, it’s lensed into three images: JD1, JD2, and JD3. They’re magnified by factors of eight, five, and two, respectively.
Rebecca Larson: Up to this point, we haven’t really been able to study galaxies in the early universe in great detail. We had only tens of them prior to Webb. Studying them can help us understand how they evolved into the ones like the galaxy we live in today. And also, how the universe evolved throughout time.
The U.S. Postal Service will issue a stamp highlighting NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope on Sept. 8, 2022. U.S. Postal Service Art Director Derry Noyes designed the stamp using existing art by James Vaughan and an image provided by NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute. Credits: U.S. Postal Service
I think my favorite part is, for so many new Webb image we get, if you look in the background, there are all these little dots—and those are all galaxies! Every single one of them. It’s amazing the amount of information that we’re getting that we just weren’t able to see before. And this is not a deep field. This is not a long exposure. We haven’t even really tried to use this telescope to look at one spot for a long time. This is just the beginning!
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s largest, most powerful, and most complex space science telescope ever built. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it.
Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) are pursuing a completely new and unconventional strategy to improve the way data can be processed and – in particular – stored. The team members, based in Mainz and Jerusalem, have come up with the idea of bringing together two different forms of chirality to develop new data storage systems that are faster, smaller, and more efficient than those currently available.
Chirality, also known as handedness in this context, describes objects that come in two distinctly different configurations that are mirror images of each other such as our left and right hand. “We were inspired by nature, where chirality is a common phenomenon. Chiral molecules can act like a filter for electron spin and ensure functionality even on the smallest scale,” said Professor Angela Wittmann of the JGU Institute of Physics.
Combining the chirality of spin configurations and molecules
In their approach, the researchers from the fields of experimental solid state physics, atomic physics, and molecular chemistry will be using recently discovered chiral spin structures. These so-called skyrmions are tiny vortices in magnetic thin films protected by their chirality. It is this kind of chiral magnetic texture that the researchers intend to combine with chiral molecules over the course of the project. The assumption is that, based on the chiral-chiral interaction, they would have a unique, flexible, controllable, and efficient means of manipulating spin structures. “With the help of a chiral molecule, it should be possible to switch the handedness of the chiral magnetic textures in thin films, for instance, from clockwise to anticlockwise,” clarified Wittmann.
In this case, the chiral molecule with its DNA-like helix structure would act like a spin filter, allowing only certain electrons moving in one direction to pass while holding others back. The researchers will use highly sophisticated sensor technologies to determine how and whether this interaction actually works.
“Our project is groundbreaking in that it brings together two different types of chirality,” emphasized Wittmann. According to the researchers, there is a very real chance that their innovative concept involving the utilization of spintronic components will result in the creation of the next generation of innovative storage, logic, and sensor devices that could be employed in unconventional computing.
The consortium consists of four members of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and two members of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who will be contributing their expertise in various disciplines. At JGU, these are Professor Angela Wittmann and Professor Mathias Kläui of the Condensed Matter Physics group, Professor Dmitry Budker of the Quantum, Atomic, and Neutron Physics group and the Helmholtz Institute Mainz (HIM), and Professor Eva Rentschler of the Department of Chemistry, collaborating with their partners Professor Yossi Paltiel and Professor Nir Bar-Gill of the Department of Applied Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Carl Zeiss Foundation sponsoring innovative projects through its new CZS Wildcard program
In early 2022, the Carl Zeiss Foundation launched its CZS Wildcard program with the objective of promoting unconventional, interdisciplinary research in the STEM field. Each team must consist of at least three researchers. The purpose of the program is to support projects that are still in a very early phase of realization and are built on original and unconventional concepts with a high potential for innovation. The first five teams will be starting work in early 2023
Astronomers around the world are captivated by an unusually bright and long-lasting pulse of high-energy radiation that swept over Earth Sunday, Oct. 9. The emission came from a gamma-ray burst (GRB) – the most powerful class of explosions in the universe – that ranks among the most luminous events known.
On Sunday morning Eastern time, a wave of X-rays and gamma rays passed through the solar system, triggering detectors aboard NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, and Wind spacecraft, as well as others. Telescopes around the world turned to the site to study the aftermath, and new observations continue.
Called GRB 221009A, the explosion provided an unexpectedly exciting start to the 10th Fermi Symposium, a gathering of gamma-ray astronomers now underway in Johannesburg, South Africa. “It’s safe to say this meeting really kicked off with a bang – everyone’s talking about this,” said Judy Racusin, a Fermi deputy project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who is attending the conference.
Swift’s X-Ray Telescope captured the afterglow of GRB 221009A about an hour after it was first detected. The bright rings form as a result of X-rays scattered from otherwise unobservable dust layers within our galaxy that lie in the direction of the burst./Credit: NASA/Swift/A. Beardmore (University of Leicester)
The signal, originating from the direction of the constellation Sagitta, had traveled an estimated 1.9 billion years to reach Earth. Astronomers think it represents the birth cry of a new black hole, one that formed in the heart of a massive star collapsing under its own weight. In these circumstances, a nascent black hole drives powerful jets of particles traveling near the speed of light. The jets pierce through the star, emitting X-rays and gamma rays as they stream into space.
The light from this ancient explosion brings with it new insights into stellar collapse, the birth of a black hole, the behavior and interaction of matter near the speed of light, the conditions in a distant galaxy – and much more. Another GRB this bright may not appear for decades.
According to a preliminary analysis, Fermi’s Large Area Telescope (LAT) detected the burst for more than 10 hours. One reason for the burst’s brightness and longevity is that, for a GRB, it lies relatively close to us.
NASA
“This burst is much closer than typical GRBs, which is exciting because it allows us to detect many details that otherwise would be too faint to see,” said Roberta Pillera, a Fermi LAT Collaboration member who led initial communications about the burst and a doctoral student at the Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy. “But it’s also among the most energetic and luminous bursts ever seen regardless of distance, making it doubly exciting.”
The burst also provided a long-awaited inaugural observing opportunity for a link between two experiments on the International Space Station – NASA’s NICER X-ray telescope and a Japanese detector called the Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI). Activated in April, the connection is dubbed the Orbiting High-energy Monitor Alert Network (OHMAN). It allows NICER to rapidly turn to outbursts detected by MAXI, actions that previously required intervention by scientists on the ground.
“OHMAN provided an automated alert that enabled NICER to follow up within three hours, as soon as the source became visible to the telescope,” said Zaven Arzoumanian, the NICER science lead at Goddard. “Future opportunities could result in response times of a few minutes.”
On Oct. 16, at 7:04 a.m. EDT, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft, the first mission to the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, will skim the Earth’s atmosphere, passing a mere 220 miles (350 kilometers) above the surface. By sling-shotting past Earth on the first anniversary of its launch, Lucy will gain some of the orbital energy it needs to travel to this never-before-visited population of asteroids.
The Trojan asteroids are trapped in orbits around the Sun at the same distance as Jupiter, either far ahead of or behind the giant planet. Lucy is currently one year into a twelve-year voyage. This gravity assist will place Lucy on a new trajectory for a two-year orbit, at which time it will return to Earth for a second gravity assist. This second assist will give Lucy the energy it needs to cross the main asteroid belt, where it will observe asteroid Donaldjohanson, and then travel into the leading Trojan asteroid swarm. There, Lucy will fly past six Trojan asteroids: Eurybates and its satellite Queta, Polymele and its yet unnamed satellite, Leucus, and Orus. Lucy will then return to Earth for a third gravity assist in 2030 to re-target the spacecraft for a rendezvous with the Patroclus-Menoetius binary asteroid pair in the trailing Trojan asteroid swarm.
This illustration shows the Lucy spacecraft passing one of the Trojan Asteroids near Jupiter./CREDIT:Southwest Research Institute
For this first gravity assist, Lucy will appear to approach Earth from the direction of the Sun. While this means that observers on Earth will not be able to see Lucy in the days before the event, Lucy will be able to take images of the nearly full Earth and Moon. Mission scientists will use these images to calibrate the instruments.
Lucy’s trajectory will bring the spacecraft very close to Earth, lower even than the International Space Station, which means that Lucy will pass through a region full of earth-orbiting satellites and debris. To ensure the safety of the spacecraft, NASA developed procedures to anticipate any potential hazard and, if needed, to execute a small maneuver to avoid a collision.
“The Lucy team has prepared two different maneuvers,” says Coralie Adam, Lucy deputy navigation team chief from KinetX Aerospace in Simi Valley, California. “If the team detects that Lucy is at risk of colliding with a satellite or piece of debris, then–12 hours before the closest approach to Earth –the spacecraft will execute one of these, altering the time of closest approach by either two or four seconds. This is a small correction, but it is enough to avoid a potentially catastrophic collision.”
NASA/Photo: Nasa.gov
Lucy will be passing the Earth at such a low altitude that the team had to include the effect of atmospheric drag when designing this flyby. Lucy’s large solar arrays increase this effect.
“In the original plan, Lucy was actually going to pass about 30 miles closer to the Earth,” says Rich Burns, Lucy project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “However, when it became clear that we might have to execute this flyby with one of the solar arrays unlatched, we chose to use a bit of our fuel reserves so that the spacecraft passes the Earth at a slightly higher altitude, reducing the disturbance from the atmospheric drag on the spacecraft’s solar arrays.”
At around 6:55 a.m. EDT, Lucy will first be visible to observers on the ground in Western Australia (6:55 p.m. for those observers). Lucy will quickly pass overhead, clearly visible to the naked eye for a few minutes before disappearing at 7:02 a.m. EDT as the spacecraft passes into the Earth’s shadow. Lucy will continue over the Pacific Ocean in darkness and emerge from the Earth’s shadow at 7:26 a.m. EDT. If the clouds cooperate, sky watchers in the western United States should be able to get a view of Lucy with the aid of binoculars.
“The last time we saw the spacecraft, it was being enclosed in the payload fairing in Florida,” said Hal Levison, Lucy principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) Boulder, Colorado office. “It is exciting that we will be able to stand here in Colorado and see the spacecraft again. And this time Lucy will be in the sky.”
Lucy will then rapidly recede from the Earth’s vicinity, passing by the Moon and taking a few more calibration images before continuing out into interplanetary space.
“I’m especially excited by the final few images that Lucy will take of the Moon,” said John Spencer, acting deputy project scientist at SwRI. “Counting craters to understand the collisional history of the Trojan asteroids is key to the science that Lucy will carry out, and this will be the first opportunity to calibrate Lucy’s ability to detect craters by comparing it to previous observations of the Moon by other space missions.”
The public is invited to join the #WaveToLucy social media campaign by posting images of themselves waving towards the spacecraft and tagging the @NASASolarSystem account. Additionally, if you are in an area where Lucy will be visible, take a photograph of Lucy and post it to social media with the #SpotTheSpacecraft hashtag.
Instructions for observing Lucy from your location are available here.
The Prime Minister, Narendra Modi has paid his tributes to Ex-President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam on his birth anniversary. The Prime Minister recalled the contributions of Dr Kalam as a scientist and as a President who struck a chord with every section of society.
The Prime Minister tweeted;
“Tributes to our former President Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam. He is greatly admired for his contribution to our nation as a scientist and as a President who struck a chord with every section of society.”
Tributes to our former President Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam. He is greatly admired for his contribution to our nation as a scientist and as a President who struck a chord with every section of society. pic.twitter.com/vPwICWxA3u
