Zafar Futehally (Indian Naturalist) passes away

Who:   Zafar Futehally

What: Ornithology and Conservation

Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna and Arjuna Awards- 2013

Who:   Ronjan Sodhi (Trap shooter)
What:  Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna
Why:   Indian to win two back-to-back World Cup gold medals
Other Facts: Interestingly, it is for the third consecutive year that a Khel Ratna award has gone to a shooter.

Who:   Virat Kohli
Why:   Arjuna award for Cricket

Who:   PV Sindhu
What:  Arjuna Award
Why:   first Indian woman shuttler to clinch a bronze medal at the recent World Championships

Note:  14 sportspersons picked for the Arjuna award

Tripura High Court Launches India's first Cyber Forensic Lab

Why:            1- Need of Decentralized System

                      2- Difficult to control everything from Delhi

What:            SMS facility to inform both litigant and the Lawyer (e governance)

Objective:     Modernization of Legal Service

Visa on arrival in four more cities

• Visa-on-Arrival facility for tourists will now be available at four more international airports across the country, besides the four existing metropolitan cities.
• Initiated at Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi, Hyderabad and Bangalore airports with effect from August 15.
• Visitors from 11 countries, including Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines and Myanmar, are eligible to avail the VoA facility.
• The scheme has contributed to an increase in the number of tourists from these countries, and the government is in the final stages of consultations on allowing the facility to citizens of another 10 countries, including Germany, France and Russia.

Biocon launches drug for Psoriasis cure

Chairperson and MD, Biocon, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

• Indian biotechnology firm announced launch of first drug for Psoriosis (a skin disease). 
• The drug is called ALZUMAb, which took 10 years of R&D before it was released.
• It is supposed to affect 1-2% of Indian population. 

Camel- carrier of Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-Co-V)

• Although the researchers found antibodies to MERS in the camels, it does not necessarily mean the animals are passing the virus to humans. This has yet to be proven.
• MERS is a member of a the coronavirus family which in humans causes illnesses ranging from the common cold to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
• The infection had not been seen in humans before April 2012. In most cases it has caused severe illness, with death occurring in about half of them.

Shalini Singh bags Prem Bhatiya award-2013

Shalini Singh, a Deputy Editor with The Hindu, has bagged the prestigious Prem Bhatia Award for Political Reporting-2013.

The award ceremony will be held on August 11, where the former Foreign Secretary and chairman of the National Security Advisory Board (NSAB), Shyam Saran, will deliver the 18th Annual Prem Bhatia Memorial Lecture.

Source: The Hindu

Genetically Modified Crops and Monsanto in India

About Monsanto: Monsanto is the largest company that manufactures genetically modified seeds. In last quarter alone they reported a net sales of $4.2 billions and profit of around $1000 million. Corn, soybeans and cotton are the most common GE crops in US. around 90% of these crops are produces by GM seeds in US.

BRAI Bill: Biotechnology Regulatory Authority Bill

• There are growing protests to ban Monsanto from India, since it is hurting commercial interest of the farmers at the same time fiddling with the environment.
• Earlier Monsanto has been banned from Europe on the same lines.
• Prior to this there was a lot of debate on introduction of GM Bt Brinjal in Indian fields. The concern was that the genetically engineered Bt Brinjal would soon become a weed, hence would pose threat to biodiversity.
• Philippines Supreme Court has recently banned open field trials of Bt Brinjal.
• Supreme Court of India appointed a Technical Expert Committee (TEC)
• Then, TEC recommended 10 years suspension of on field trails of GE food crops.
• While people supporting GM crops believe that conventional agricultural methodology is not sufficient to meet the growing demands of our population.

Note:We must note that our food insecurity is not majorly because of production shortfall but is due to a poorly managed supply chain system where a big chunk of foodgrains rot in our godowns.

Myanmar celebrates 25th anniversary of the '8888' movement

When: 8th Aug 1988 (thats why '8888')

Where: Burma (Nationwide)

What: a series of marches, demonstrations, protests, and riots

Why: Since 1962, the country had been ruled by the Burma Socialist Programme Party regime as a one-party state, headed by General Ne Win. The catastrophic Burmese Way to Socialism had turned Burma into one of the world's most impoverished countries. Almost everything was nationalized and the government combined Soviet-style central planning with superstitious beliefs. 

Explanation: Hundreds of thousands of ochre-robed monks, young children, university students, housewives, and doctors demonstrated against the regime. The uprising ended on 18 September, after a bloody military coup by the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). Thousands of deaths have been attributed to the military during this uprising, while authorities in Myanmar put the figure at around 350 people killed. 

During the crisis, Aung San Suu Kyi emerged as a national icon. When the military junta arranged an election in 1990, her party, the National League for Democracy, won 80% of the seats in the government (392 out of 447). But the military junta suppressed everything that could have developed from these democratic achievements.

Sources: Wiki

Source of Controversial HeLa Cells revealed

• The HeLa cell line is named after Henrietta Lacks, a woman whose aggressive cervical cancer killed her in 1951. 
• Researchers used cells sampled from that tumor to create the HeLa cell line, the first and now by far the most commonly used in cell biology laboratories. 
• Recently a science journalist published a book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, that revealed how insensitively biomedical researchers have treated the family over the decades.
• HeLa genome has been “remarkably stable”, in spite of evolving for 6 decades in different laboratories around the world.  
• Since then, these cells have been extensively used for a wide variety of biomedical research and played a part in several Nobel-Prize-winning scientific discoveries.