For decades, there have been concerns that India's universities were being bogged down by the number of institutes they had to manage. Recently, the University Grants Commission accepted in principle that autonomy must be green-lighted. But debates on the freedom of institutions remain inconclusive, reports Deepa A.

A National Convention of Nomads and Adivasis was organized last month in Delhi. This was perhaps one of the first attempts to give a unified political voice for Adivasi and Nomadic communities in India. G. N. Devy writes on the efforts to make this convention happen, and its import.

Krishna Rupanagunta urges a determined beginning to counting the true costs of hardship in labour.

As the government shows Doordarshan's director the door, Prasar Bharati member B G Verghese protests the intrusion by the administration into constitutionally protected domain.

Eight months before the upcoming WTO ministerial of December 2005, prominent economists are closing ranks to dwarf sustained criticism of agricultural subsidies in developed nations. Devinder Sharma asserts that the continued undermining of food self-sufficiency in developing nations is economic lunacy.

The television cameras and news reports tell us how dramatic the India Against Corruption campaign's rise to national consciousness has been. The story of how it unfolded is even more interesting, writes Devinder Sharma.

The real reason behind the Congress' performance in the recently concluded Assembly Elections may not be the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party per se, but more the economic concerns of the real aam aadmi. Devinder Sharma analyses.

Pakistan has decided to lift lockdown to kick-start its tottering economy. The growth engine of Pakistan’s economic revival is powered by CPEC, flagship project of the Belt Road Initiative (BRI). It is tempting to conjure...

Beijing, May 06: US President Donald Trump has nominated senior Indian-American diplomat Manisha Singh as his envoy to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Currently Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs at the State Department, Singh

The prestigious awards show, International Iconic Awards 2020 (Season 6), which is organised by Mohammed Nagaman Lateef and Aditya Khurana, will be held in Mumbai after the lockdown is lifted. The most deserving actors will be honoured for all the efforts

Archives, Room Use Only - QC531.T98 1884

Archives, Room Use Only - TK2921.G76 1843

Archives, Room Use Only - QB723.H2 B87 1910

Archives, Room Use Only - HE206.H47 1974

Archives, Room Use Only - QC544.G2 H37 1890

Fear of virus is overshadowing government appeals to businesses to resume operations

The Tamil Nadu government has constituted a committee comprising of economists, industrialists, bankers and educationists to assess the impact of Covid-19 pandemic on the state. It will present a report to the state government in three months.

C. Rangarajan, former RBI governor, to head committee

FDI by firms moving from China to India will help offset damage: Kotak’s Shah

Experts to help TN govt get economy back on track

Lyft, Uber and Airbnb depend on travel, vacations and gatherings. That's a problem when much of the world is staying home

The committee shall submit its final reports to the government within three months time and also submit an interim report

The renewable sector holds the key to not only offsetting the job losses due to the pandemic, but also making the recovery sustainable

Nanoparticles are essential electrocatalysts in chemical production, water treatment and energy conversion, but engineering efficient and specific catalysts requires understanding complex structure–reactivity relations. Recent experiments have shown that Bragg coherent diffraction imaging might be a powerful tool in this regard. The technique provides three-dimensional lattice strain fields from which surface reactivity maps can be inferred. However, all experiments published so far have investigated particles an order of magnitude larger than those used in practical applications. Studying smaller particles quickly becomes demanding as the diffracted intensity falls. Here, in situ nanodiffraction data from 60 nm Au nanoparticles under electrochemical control collected at the hard X-ray nanoprobe beamline of MAX IV, NanoMAX, are presented. Two-dimensional image reconstructions of these particles are produced, and it is estimated that NanoMAX, which is now open for general users, has the requisites for three-dimensional imaging of particles of a size relevant for catalytic applications. This represents the first demonstration of coherent X-ray diffraction experiments performed at a diffraction-limited storage ring, and illustrates the importance of these new sources for experiments where coherence properties become crucial.

Indanomycin is biosynthesized by a hybrid nonribosomal peptide synthase/polyketide synthase (NRPS/PKS) followed by a number of `tailoring' steps to form the two ring systems that are present in the mature product. It had previously been hypothesized that the indane ring of indanomycin was formed by the action of IdmH using a Diels–Alder reaction. Here, the crystal structure of a selenomethionine-labelled truncated form of IdmH (IdmH-Δ99–107) was solved using single-wavelength anomalous dispersion (SAD) phasing. This truncated variant allows consistent and easy crystallization, but importantly the structure was used as a search model in molecular replacement, allowing the full-length IdmH structure to be determined to 2.7 Å resolution. IdmH is a homodimer, with the individual protomers consisting of an α+β barrel. Each protomer contains a deep hydrophobic pocket which is proposed to constitute the active site of the enzyme. To investigate the reaction catalysed by IdmH, 88% of the backbone NMR resonances were assigned, and using chemical shift perturbation of [15N]-labelled IdmH it was demonstrated that indanomycin binds in the active-site pocket. Finally, combined quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical (QM/MM) modelling of the IdmH reaction shows that the active site of the enzyme provides an appropriate environment to promote indane-ring formation, supporting the assignment of IdmH as the key Diels–Alderase catalysing the final step in the biosynthesis of indanomycin through a similar mechanism to other recently characterized Diels–Alderases involved in polyketide-tailoring reactions. An animated Interactive 3D Complement (I3DC) is available in Proteopedia at https://proteopedia.org/w/Journal:IUCrJ:S2052252519012399.

Although often presented as taking single `snapshots' of the conformation of a protein, X-ray crystallography provides an averaged structure over time and space within the crystal. The important but difficult task of characterizing structural ensembles in crystals is typically limited to small conformational changes, such as multiple side-chain conformations. A crystallographic method was recently introduced that utilizes residual electron and anomalous density (READ) to characterize structural ensembles encompassing large-scale structural changes. Key to this method is an ability to accurately measure anomalous signals and distinguish them from noise or other anomalous scatterers. This report presents an optimized data-collection and analysis strategy for partially occupied iodine anomalous signals. Using the long-wavelength-optimized beamline I23 at Diamond Light Source, the ability to accurately distinguish the positions of anomalous scatterers with occupancies as low as ∼12% is demonstrated. The number and positions of these anomalous scatterers are consistent with previous biophysical, kinetic and structural data that suggest that the protein Im7 binds to the chaperone Spy in multiple partially occupied conformations. Finally, READ selections demonstrate that re-measured data using the new protocols are consistent with the previously characterized structural ensemble of the chaperone Spy with its client Im7. This study shows that a long-wavelength beamline results in easily validated anomalous signals that are strong enough to be used to detect and characterize highly disordered sections of crystal structures.

This work describes a method to characterize the size distribution of individual aqueous droplets in a high-density and polydisperse aerosol. It is shown that droplets smaller than 120 nm can be generated by purely mechanical means using a gas dynamic virtual nozzle, and theoretical models are provided for the different flow regimes investigated.

The crystal structure of the organic pigment 2-monomethyl-quinacridone (Pigment Red 192, C21H14N2O2) was solved from X-ray powder diffraction data. The resulting average structure is described in space group Poverline 1, Z = 1 with the molecule on the inversion centre. The molecules are arranged in chains. The molecules, which have no inversion symmetry, show orientational head-to-tail disorder. In the average structure, the methyl group is disordered and found on both ends of the molecule with an occupancy of 0.5 each. The disorder and the local structure were investigated using various ordered structural models. All models were analysed by three approaches: Rietveld refinement, structure refinement to the pair distribution function (PDF) and lattice-energy minimization. All refinements converged well. The Rietveld refinement provided the average structure and gave no indication of a long-range ordering. The refinement to the PDF turned out to be very sensitive to small structural details, giving insight into the local structure. The lattice-energy minimizations revealed a significantly preferred local ordering of neighbouring molecules along the [0ar 11] direction. In conclusion, all methods indicate a statistical orientational disorder with a preferred parallel orientation of molecules in one direction. Additionally, electron diffraction revealed twinning and faint diffuse scattering.

The way that massive stars form remains mysterious, in part, because massive stars are rare and tend to spend their youth shrouded by dust and gas and hidden from view.

The post Radio telescopes give astronomers rare glimpse at a young protostar’s formation appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

The newfound world, GJ1214b, is about 6.5 times as massive as the Earth. Its host star, GJ1214, is a small, red type M star about one-fifth the size of the Sun. GJ1214b orbits its star once every 38 hours at a distance of only 1.3 million miles. Astronomers estimate the planet's temperature to be about 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Although warm as an oven, it is still cooler than any other known transiting planet because it orbits a very dim star.

The post Astronomers Find Super-Earth Using Amateur, Off-the-Shelf Technology appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Chi Cygni pulses once every 408 days. At its smallest diameter of 300 million miles, it becomes mottled with brilliant spots as massive plumes of hot plasma roil its surface. As it expands, Chi Cygni cools and dims, growing to a diameter of 480 million miles—large enough to engulf and cook our solar system out to the asteroid belt.

The post Distant, dying star gives astronomers preview of the fate of our Sun appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

For the first time, astronomers have found a supernova explosion with properties similar to a gamma-ray burst, but without seeing any gamma rays from it.

The post Astronomers Find Rare Supernova by New Means appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

"Just like mirrors in a changing room show you a clothing outfit from all sides, interstellar dust clouds act like mirrors to show us different sides of the supernova," Rest explains.

The post Astronomers see supernova from a new angle appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Eric Silver of SAO is pursuing innovative and interdisciplinary uses of his technique for chemical imaging at the cellular level.

The post Technology developed for X-ray astronomy is being adapted to study cancer cells appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Now that astronomers are finding rocky worlds orbiting distant stars, they're asking the next logical questions: Do any of those worlds have volcanoes? And if so, could we detect them? Work by theorists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics suggests that the answer to the latter is a qualified "Yes."

The post Can we spot volcanoes on alien worlds? Astronomers say yes appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

The Kepler spacecraft was launched in March of 2009 to study extrasolar planets. One of its major goals is the detection of terrestrial planets in habitable zones.

The post Kepler spacecraft used by Smithsonian astronomers to find other earths appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has unveiled a previously unseen structure centered in the Milky Way--a finding likened in terms of scale to the discovery of a new continent on Earth. The feature, which spans 50,000 light-years, may be the remnant of an eruption from a supersized black hole at the center of our galaxy.

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Today, researchers who found the first hypervelocity stars escaping the Milky Way announced that their search also turned up a dozen double-star systems. Half of those are merging and might explode as supernovae in the astronomically near future.

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