The post BBCI and IIT Guwahati signs MoU for research collaborations appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>The MoU was signed following a virtual meeting between BBCI Director Dr Amal Chandra Kataki and IITG Director Prof T G Sitharam along with other faculties from both the institutes, according to a press release issued by BBCI.
Higher incidence of cancers of gallbladder, oesophagus, nasopharynx, lung, and stomach among both men and women of North East India cannot solely be explained by existing evidence available in the western literature, Mr Kataki said.
Our goal should be to conduct region specific research with focus on environmental and dietary practices prevalent in the region”, he said.
Moreover, there is an untapped potential for researchers to collaborate and find new biomarkers that can predict outcomes to treatment, design and develop low cost instruments, and discover advanced techniques of cancer drug delivery, Mr Kataki added.
North East Center for Biological Sciences and Healthcare Engineering (NECBH) was established at IIT-Guwahati in 2018 with a vision to foster the development of biological research in the region, Mr Sitharam said.
The mission of NECBH-outreach is to raise the quality of research in biological sciences and healthcare engineering in the entire North-Eastern India, he said.
The outreach programme intends to provide an exposure and training to the researchers in the NE region to the latest advances in modern day biological research and healthcare engineering, the IIT Guwahati Director added.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Edge Media staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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]]>The post India likely to see a rise in Covid 19 infections : Researchers appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>The country may see a worsening of its outbreak as soon as this month, with the next wave peaking in the best-case scenario with less than 100,000 infections a day, or nearly 150,000 in the worst scenario, according to estimates by researchers led by Mathukumalli Vidyasagar and Manindra Agrawal at Indian Institute of Technology in Hyderabad and Kanpur respectively.
States with high Covid rates, such as Kerala and Maharashtra, could “skew the picture,” Vidyasagar told Bloomberg in an email.
The next wave is likely to be far smaller than the second wave that peaked at a record 400,000-plus daily cases on May 7 and declined sharply thereafter. But the forecast still underscores the need for India to accelerate its vaccination campaign, deploy surveillance methods to catch emerging hotspots and stay vigilant through genome sequencing given the potential for new variants to emerge.
The delta strain now causing renewed outbreaks across the world was first identified in India last October.
Stepping up public health efforts and avoiding past mistakes will be key if India wants to save lives and livelihoods when the next wave descends.
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]]>The post Fresh research shows that MIT’s old research can become a reality appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>The new study was conducted by Gaya Herrington, a researcher at KPMG International, an Anglo-Dutch multinational professional services network. According to Harrington, she conducted the research to prove or disprove MIT’s theory. She studied 10 key variables, including population, industrial output, population, fertility rates, pollution levels, food production etc.
Herrington concluded that the world could actually experience a “total societal collapse” by 2040. Her data was found most closely aligned with two particular scenarios from the original study: Business-as-usual (represented as BAU2) and CT (Comprehensive Technology). According to Herrington’s report, which was published in the Yale Journal of Industrial Ecology, both scenarios “show a halt in growth within a decade or so from now” and indicate that continuing business as usual, that is, pursuing continuous growth, “is not possible.”
In their research, the MIT researchers had envisaged 12 scenarios, most of which projected a point at which natural resources would become so scarce that any future growth would become “impossible”, and personal welfare would decline. Published in that year’s bestselling book, The Limits to Expansion, the study had described the imminent “collapse” as a point which would see standards of living around the world deteriorate, for decades, and not a point which would be the “end” of the human race.
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]]>The post Current batch of vaccines might be less effective against the Beta variant. appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>The study by researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital in the US, which was published in the ‘Science’ journal on June 24, used cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) to analyse the spike proteins, present on the surface of SARS-CoV-2.
The researchers compared the spike proteins from the original virus found in China in 2019, with that of the Beta and the Alpha variant, first identified in South Africa and in the UK respectively.
The results have reportedly indicated that the mutations in the Beta variant, also known as B.1.351, can change the shape of the spike surface at certain locations.
Since all current vaccines are directed against specific spike proteins, the Beta variant might not get neutralised by them. The vaccines would be less able to bind to the Beta virus, which may allow it to evade the immune system even when people are inoculated.
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