Kerala minister vows to quit smoking on mother turning 80 |  |
- Kerala minister vows to quit smoking on mother turning 80
- Tracking the wave of success for Team GB's swimmers
- A new source of maize hybrid vigor
| Kerala minister vows to quit smoking on mother turning 80 Posted: 28 Jun 2012 02:48 PM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Thiruvananthapuram, June 28 - Kerala Labour Minister Shibu Baby John has decided to give up cigarettes, his companion for the past 32 years, as a birthday gift for his mother who turns 80 on Sunday. My ammachi - is turning 80, this Sunday and I have decided that as my gift to her, I will forego my 'companion'. I know it's going to be a tough ask because now I smoke more than 30 cigarettes a day and have been doing it for so many years, John, took his first puff as a schoolboy, told IANS. The 49-year-old second time legislator is the son of legendary trade union leader and veteran politician Baby John who passed away in 2008. John recalled that he had tried stopping smoking a few times without success, and the last such occassion was after he was made a minister for the first time last May. I could not stop it, but this time I will, we will wait and see, said John, the lone legislator of the Revolutionary Socialist Party - and elected from the Chavara constituency, which his father represented for more than three decades. http://www.rxpgnews.com |
| Tracking the wave of success for Team GB's swimmers Posted: 28 Jun 2012 05:00 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Training sessions for Team GB's swimmers have been getting a helping hand from a new system incorporating cutting-edge movement tracking and sensor technologies. From starting dives to tumble turns the state-of-the-art coaching aid is the first of its kind to be able to track movement wirelessly through water. The system has been developed at Loughborough University's Sports Technology Institute in conjunction with British Swimming, with funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Other partners are UK Sport, Imperial College London and Queen Mary University of London. It generates comprehensive data on the swimmer's body position, speed and acceleration and enables coaches to provide feedback and advice that is more immediate, more detailed and more objective than previously possible. The data is accessed via a laptop and could be used by those with expertise to interpret the information to suggest alterations to the swimmer's technique at the poolside during training. Not only has the Loughborough team refined a range of existing sensing and motion tracking technologies for use in the system, but this is also the first time these technologies have been assembled into one integrated package. Moreover, the system is underpinned by revolutionary patentable technology specially developed by the researchers that enables data to be transmitted wirelessly through water. Transmitting signals wirelessly is much more difficult through water than through air, especially in a swimming pool where there is so much water turbulence and noise from pool filtration systems, says Professor Paul Conway, who, together with Professor Andy West, has led the project. Solving this problem was vital to the development of our multi-component motion tracking system. In the past, during training sessions, coaches have provided feedback to Britain's elite swimmers based on the limited impression they form using... http://www.rxpgnews.com |
| A new source of maize hybrid vigor Posted: 28 Jun 2012 05:00 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) URBANA -- Steve Moose, an associate professor of maize functional genomics at the University of Illinois and his graduate student Wes Barber think they may have discovered a new source of heterosis, or hybrid vigor, in maize. They have been looking at small RNAs (sRNAs), a class of double-stranded RNA molecules that are 20 to 25 nucleotides in length. Hybrid vigor refers to the increased vigor or general health, resistance to disease, and other superior qualities arising from the crossbreeding of genetically different plants. We've always known that there's a genetic basis for this heterosis, said Moose. Charles Darwin noticed it and commented that corn was particularly dramatic. Scientists have been debating the sources of hybrid vigor since the early 1900s when Mendel's laws were rediscovered. Many of them disagreed with the model that prevailed from the 1920s to the 1950s, which linked heterosis to a single gene or to the interaction of several genes. It seemed that the whole genome was involved, said Moose. The discovery of DNA in 1953 eventually caused a paradigm shift in the way people looked at hybrid vigor but, Moose said, there was no unifying theory. Even as new genetic technologies were developed, the genes did not seem to explain everything. We thought that maybe it's the rest of the genome, the remaining 85 percent of the corn genome, that's important, said Moose. sRNAs were originally found in 1998 in roundworms. Researchers studying virus resistance in plants then began to notice them and observed that the way that they function is very different from the functioning of protein-coding genes. Every time we have a breakthrough in our knowledge of genetics, people have looked to see if that breakthrough brings any insight into the mystery of the hybrid vigor, said Moose. That's what we've done with the small RNAs. When you think about what small RNAs do, they participate in regulating growth and they tell other... http://www.rxpgnews.com |
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