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Indian rupee has continued to slump against the dollars. According to  International Monetary Fund (IMF), in the near future, the rupee may fall beyond the 94 rupees.  India’s forex reserves have also dropped below $600 billion, reduced by more than $50 billion since September 2021, when forex reserves stood at an all-time high of $642 billion. This drop in forex reserves is said to be taken place  due to the interventions made by the Reserve Bank of India, to bring the rupee to its natural value.  However according to RBI officials, the drop in forex reserves is due to a fall in the dollar value of assets held as reserves by the RBI. To avoid the market rate volatility , RBI looks to reach to a natural value of rupees. RBI issued directives to the state run bank to sell dollars in the open market in the exchange of rupees, so as to increase the demand of rupees.  The value of the currency is determined by its demand & supply. When the supply of the currenc...

  Agriculture department has stepped up efforts to encourage more farmers to adopt the Direct Seeded Rice (DSR) method as a means to achieve better water use and rice production efficiency.  The DSR method of paddy cultivation is steadily gaining ground among farmers in the traditional paddy growing areas   The COVID-19 outbreak & subsequent lockdown had led to the exodus of labour. Shortage of labour was delaying the planting of rice for two seasons. DSR technology was enough popular among farmers, to convince them to go for it.  DSR will save irrigation water, labour & energy (power) in contrast to conventional method of raising rice nursery and then transplanting rice seedlings in a puddled field.  It is less time consuming , there’s lesser weed problem, besides there is reduced incidence of nutrient deficiency, especially iron, owing to lesser leaching of nutrients and deeper root development.  The technology has a wider adaptability as it is su...

The recent summers in Europe and America witnessed unusual growth in temperature. The temperature in its high was even more than 40°C.  The wildfires spread across the Europe and America was the result of extreme heat and the dry weather conditions, resulted in loss of around 19000 hectares of forests in Southwestern France.  Italy is reeling under the 200 days long drought , especially in Po river basin , which is called as “food bowl” of the Europe. At least 748 heat-related deaths have been reported in the heat wave in Spain and neighboring Portugal, where temperatures reached 47° C in recent month.  Considering the average annual temperature, the last eight years have been the hottest ever recorded through direct measurements since the 1880s, a NASA analysis showed.  Global temperature has seen a rise of 1°C in recent times. Even polar temperature has seen a variation of 3° C. According to the research workers,  anthropogenic factors are responsible for the ...

  The AMOC is a large system of ocean currents. It is the Atlantic branch of the ocean conveyor belt or Thermohaline circulation (THC), and distributes heat and nutrients throughout the world’s ocean basins.  It carries the warm surface water from the tropics to  northwards into the North Atlantic.  This ocean current system is driven by differences in temperature and salt content i.e. the water’s density.  The tropical warm water flows northwards ,due to high temperature evaporation occurs, which increases the amount of salt.  The temperature of water drops at north. Low temperature and a high salt content make the water denser, and this dense water sinks deep into the ocean . This cold and dense water creeps towards the south to the tropics, typically 2–4 km below the surface. Eventually, it gets pulled back to the surface and warms in a process called “upwelling” and the circulation is complete. The global circulation process keeps on mixing the water so...

By comparing and analysing protein structures, it is possible to get ideas about biological evolution, diseases, defence mechanisms, etc. This explains the human quest for finding the structures of proteins.  In 1972, Christian B. Anfinsen won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his experiments that showed that a protein could fold into its structure based on the information contained in the sequence of amino acids.  Max Perutz and others experimentally determined the first protein structures of myoglobin and haemoglobin. They did this through a method called X-ray crystallography that uses protein crystals and X-rays.  India has had a legacy of being a top player in the field of protein structural work, both experimental and computational.  The Ramachandran Plot devised nearly 60 years ago by G.N. Ramachandran and others from the University of Madras is used even today the world over to validate protein structures. In 1994, John Moult and his colleagues started an ex...