Thursday, June 28, 2012

NATIONAL NEWS

• New formula ends IIT row
  • Ending weeks of disagreement over a common entrance test for admission to undergraduate engineering courses in the Indian Institutes of Technology, the IIT Council on Wednesday approved a fresh formula for admission, based on the rank achieved in the advanced test subject to the condition that students are in the top 20 percentile of successful candidates of their Boards;
  • In simple terms, a student will be required to clear the common joint entrance examination (JEE)-main with a high score to qualify for the advanced examination, which will be held for those aspiring to enter the IIT system. However, among students who crack the advanced examination, only those who are placed in the top 20 percentile in the Board exams will be admitted to the IITs.
• Western Ghats' heritage status to be decided today
  • The World Heritage Committee, which is meeting at St. Petersburg in Russia, will decide on Thursday the heritage status of Western Ghats. The discussion, originally scheduled for July 1, has been advanced. Western Ghats is being considered under the category “review and approval of retrospective statements of Outstanding Universal Value”;
  • The fate of India’s persistent campaign for 39 serial sites will be decided by a 21-nation panel. The committee, at its lat-year meeting in France, “deferred the examination of the nomination of the Western Ghats to the World Heritage List” for one year;
  • Listing the exceptional species’ richness and endemism of the Ghats, as pointed out in IUCN report, it will be stressed that the region is home to “some 5,000 vascular plant species, 228 freshwater fish species, 179 amphibians, 157 reptiles, 508 birds and 139 mammal species,” and a large number of them, endemic.

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

• Protest over China's South China Sea oil tender
  • A Chinese state-run oil company’s offer of tenders to foreign partners for nine oil blocks in the South China Sea has triggered a protest from Vietnam, amid rising tensions between China and several of its neighbours over the disputed region;
  • Vietnam, which had earlier angered China by entering into joint exploration projects with India and Russia, described the offer from the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) as “illegal”;
  • CNOOC, China’s third biggest oil company, announced this week it would issue tenders seeking joint exploitation of nine blocks, stretching over 160,000 square kilometres, against the backdrop of tensions with Vietnam and the Philippines following a stand-off between ships at the Scarborough Shoal;
  • Vietnam, which asserts claims over some of the blocks, said it “strongly protests” the offer by CNOOC. The Foreign Ministry, in a statement, said the blocks were located within Vietnam’s 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone.

EMINENT PERSONS IN THE NEWS

• Read this article about Bikram Keshari Roy Burman, a famed professor and anthropologist

EDITORIALS, OPINIONS & COLUMNS

• Read this article by Andre Beteille on the stand-off between the Govt and the opposition
• Read this article on the proposed research and innovation universities bill, which was introduced recently in Parliament

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

• Green Rust could scrape toxic metals
  • A rare kind of mineral known as “green rust”, which could be used to scrape toxic metals and radioactive species from the environment, also played a similar and crucial role early in Earth’s history. Research suggests for the first time that ‘green rust’ was likely widespread in ancient oceans and may have played a vital role in the creation of our early atmosphere;
  • Only discovered last decade, green rust is a highly reactive iron mineral which experts hope could be used to clean up metal pollution and even radioactive waste. “Because it is so reactive, green rust has hardly ever been found before in nature and never in a water system like this,” explains Poulton, who led the research team involving experts from the Universities of Newcastle, Nancy, Southern Denmark, Leeds, Brussels and Kansas, and the Canadian Light Source and Indonesian Institute of Sciences;
  • “The discovery of green rust in Lake Matano, Indonesia, where we carried out our experiments shows for the first time what a key role it played in our ancient oceans — scavenging dissolved nickel, a key micronutrient for methanogenesis.”
• Read this article to review the current status of the Voyager expeditions of NASA