Author: Akshat Rathi

Akshat Rathi is a senior reporter for Bloomberg News. He has previously worked at Quartz, The Economist and The Conversation. His writing has appeared in Nature, The Guardian and The Hindu. He has a PhD in chemistry from Oxford University and a BTech in chemical engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai.

Curious Bends – math puzzle winner, worm sperms, banning nuclear weapons and more

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1. Asking for a ban on nuclear weapons is futile, but this first step might help

There are many who want nuclear weapons banned, but they tend to be the countries who don’t have them. The countries that have nuclear weapons are disproportionately stronger, both economically and militarily, than the rest. This power imbalance creates a situation where calls for a nuclear weapons ban falls on deaf ears. One way out is to sign a convention barring first-use. (5 min read)

2. American Indian mathematician wins prize for solving 50-year-old math puzzle

Nikhil Srivastava, now at Microsoft Research India, has been named a joint winner of the prestigious George Polya Prize for finding the proof of what is known as the Kadison-Singer conjecture, first proposed by Richard Kadison and Isadore Singer in 1959. It pertains to the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, and asks if unique information can be extrapolated from a scenario in which not all features can be observed or measured. Srivastava and two others found an answer about a year ago. (2 min read)

3. Worm sperm may have helped uncover the mechanism underlying the formation of new species

“Different species are usually unsuccessful at interbreeding; if they do, the hybrid offspring is usually sterile. In this way, species are kept separate and the diversity of life is maintained. In a study published in PLOS Biology this week, scientists observed that when female worms belonging to the Caenorhabditis genus mate outside their species, they end up with reduced lifespans and fewer offspring than usual. While exploring the possible reasons, they may have uncovered a mechanism underlying the formation of new species.” (2 min read)

+ The author of this piece, Nandita Jayaraj, is a journalist with The Hindu.

4. ‘Money is not a problem in Indian science,’ researchers say. This proves them wrong.

Not long ago, senior researchers were complaining that the real problem in Indian science is not money but a lack of leadership. But now, nearly 3,000 junior researchers at India’s premier research institutes are protesting because of lack of funding and delays in payments. There is a disconnect between how science is done at these two levels and it exposes new cracks in the system. (3 min read)

​5. Informal healthcare providers (IPs) outnumber doctors in rural India, but that’s not bad

“IPs are on the margins of formalised medicine, but over the years they have established important niches, particularly in rural areas. They work within well-developed institutional arrangements, which have evolved in different directions in different contexts. This study dispels the myth that IPs are solo ‘quacks’ with only limited links to their community and to local institutions. It also underlines the likelihood that IPs will continue to play a role for quite a long time irrespective of increasing incomes and infrastructural development.” (24 min read)

Chart of the week

An analysis of all rape cases in Delhi registered in 2013 paints a more complex picture of the problem, according to The Hindu. For instance, an interesting fact is that nearly half of some 600 cases filed involved girls’ parents accusing the boy of rape because the young couple eloped. Another is that the conviction rate now is about the same (23%) as the national average was in 2010 (26%).

rape_2029049a

10 reasons why digging a tunnel under London is an epic endeavour

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The BBC has a nice documentary on Crossrail, a £15 billion project to build a new 120-km train line passing through central London. I knew that this is a great engineering challenge, but I did not appreciate the scale of difficulty the engineers faced. You can watch the three one-hour episodes here (need UK access), or here’s the summary of the interesting points illustrated with pictures (credit: BBC, Wikipedia):

1. The project is using eight specially made tunnel-boring machines (shown below), each with a female name, such as Elizabeth, Mary and Victoria.

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2. One of the biggest challenges has been tunnelling under Tottenham Court Road station. It is where the tunnel-boring machine needed to pass through very crowded space. The tunnellers have labelled it “the eye of the needle”. There the 900-tonne tunnel-boring machine has had to pass through a space where 30cm above it was a live escalator and 85 cm underneath was the active Northern Line.

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3. When drilling under London, tunnellers need to ensure that all the buildings above ground remain as they were. This is tricky because during the operation, there is every possibility of disturbing the earth beneath some ancient buildings, causing them to tilt or, worse, crash down. To monitor the balance, they have installed laser sensors which measure any movement. When the building starts sinking, the alarms ring.

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4. The building then needs to be brought back to its previous stable state, which is done by injecting grout just at the right place to fill up any spaces that are causing the sinking. To do that, they have created 22 massive shafts throughout London, which have small pipes originating from them spreading through the ground beneath as a spider web. Whenever there is a disturbance that the laser monitors spot, they insert a tube through the right pipe that goes under the building and pumps grout in that area, which we are assured stops the building from sinking. Some shafts operators spend 16 hours a day doing this.

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5. The Thames river is the first river in the world to have a tunnel built underneath it. That first 400m tunnel, opened in 1843, needed 16 years of work to build. The design of the boring machine built then by Marc Isambard Brunel is still in use. In the modern version the actual digging work is done by robotic arms rather than people. The tunnel under the Thames near Woolwich of about the same length as the 1843 one took only 8 months.

Thames_tunnel_shield

6. Despite nearly two centuries of expertise boring under the tunnel, it’s still quite a challenge. One of those difficulties is a tunnel near the Custom House station. Where they had to block the river, drain the area and work on expanding an already existing tunnel to fit the wide Crossrail trains.

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7. When tunnellers use the word “breakthrough” they are literally breaking through something. And when they use the phrase “seeing the light at the end of the tunnel”, they actually see light at the end of the tunnel.

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8. The Crossrail’s Canary Wharf station (shown below) is going to cost £500 million. Similarly, the new Farringdon station’s cost is £440 million.

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9. Station constructions have 22-week period allowed for archaeological investigation, if an opportunity shows up. In an old city, it almost always does. Shown here is the remain of someone who died from bubonic plague, or Black Death, in the 14th century. More than 20 other such bodies were found in the same spot near Farringdon station.

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10. Underground trains form an almost perfect air seal, pushing all the air in front of it at the same speed as it travels. Each underground station has to build ventilation systems to accommodate the pressure such pushed air can create. So next time you see a ventilation shaft outside a station, remember that is built not built to keep you cool underground but to make sure the air pressure created by trains doesn’t break things.

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Curious Bends — commoner panthers, space diplomacy, big data sells big cars and more

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

1. Why the GM debate in India won’t abate

It is a sign of its inadequacy that the debate on genetically modified crops in India is still on, with no end in sight. Although public consensus is largely polarised, the government has done its bit to postpone resolution. For one, decisions on GM crops are made as if they were “technical answers to technical questions”. For another, no formal arena of debate exists that also addresses social anxieties. (8 min read)

2. Black panthers are commoner in India than thought

Camera traps installed by the Wildlife Conservation Society of India have shown that about one in ten of all leopard images belong to black leopards (that is, black panthers). These melanistic big cats have been spotted in wildlife reserves in Kerala and Karnataka, and seem commoner in the wetter forests of the Western Ghats. In fact, written records of sightings in these parts date from 1879, and could aid conservation efforts in a country that lost its cheetahs in 1960. (2 min read)

3. One foot on Earth and another in the heavens

For smaller and middle income nations, strengthening institutional and technical capacity on the ground might be a better option than to launch satellites because more than vanity, the choice makes them better positioned to gather useful data. And if such a nation is in South Asia, then India’s planned SAARC satellite could make that choice easier, providing a finer balance between “orbital dreams and ground realities”. (5 min read)

+ The author, Nalaka Gunawardene, is a journalist and science writer from Colombo, Sri Lanka.

4. Do big carmakers know their way around big data?

When sales slumped, Mahindra & Mahindra, an Indian car-maker, used data gleaned from the social media to strip its former best-selling XUV500 model of some features and sell it cheaper. The company declined to give further details. This isn’t unique—big car-makers around the world are turning to big data to widen margins. But do they know how best to use the data or is it just that putting the squeeze on this lemon is a fad? (6 min read)

5. A geothermal bounty in the Himalayas

As the developing world edges toward an energy sufficiency crisis, scientists, environmental conservationists and governments get closer to a Mexican standoff. This is no better highlighted than with the gigawatts of geothermal energy locked up in the Himalayas. A 20-MW plant could “save three million litres of diesel”, $2 million and 28,000 tons of carbon dioxide in northern India per year. Why isn’t it being used? (2 min read)

Chart of the week

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“Both [female genital mutilation and child marriage] stem from deeply rooted social norms which can only be changed by educating parents about the harm they cause. Making foreign aid conditional on results gives governments an extra incentive not just to pass laws, but to enforce them. Police and women’s activists in some countries have set up phone hotlines and safe houses for victims or girls at risk. Most important is to make sure that girls go to school and finish their studies.” The Economist has more.

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