4.15 million emergency calls made to Indian children's safety helpline in the last year

DNA India, Sep 1, 2013

Being the most vulnerable members of society, children not only need to be the most protected but safety measures concerning them are an absolute imperative. Nishit Kumar, Head Communications and Strategic Initiatives at Childline India Foundation, that provides a helpline to children, delves on the existing measures, legal and otherwise, for child safety in India.

how safe are children in India?
To answer this very question, Childline undertook a study called the ‘The Everywhere Child Project’. Through this research, they wanted to assess the existing child safety and protection mechanisms across spaces that children usually occupy. What they found, was a disturbing revelation of blatant abuse of child rights. Some of the statistics are given below:
* 28% schools did not have separate toilets for boys and girls
* Less than 2% schools had counsellors
* Only 1% schools have sexual harassment policy
* 67% of healthcare centers have no child protection related policy
* Only 6% institutional homes maintain a record of abuse case
* Only 30% of railway security forces have booths that provide assistance to missing and other vulnerable children

The above essentially fosters a thriving platform for abuse of the child. To add to that, the statutory bodies, the key organs to facilitate child protection, showed the following numbers:
* Of the Juvenile Justice Board (JJB) reviewed, 55% of them serve only 1 district
* Less than one-fourth of the JJBs sit on all regular working days, and 44% sit only once a week.
* Less than 10% police stations have a designated space for dealing with children, while only a little over 10% police station have a designated staff to deal with such matters
* Only 20% police stations have a sexual harassment policy, and about 27% have a child protection policy

“There is a tendency to presume that the child is safe in certain environments without any further inquiry. However, that may not be so. For instance, the concept of neglect of a child at home has little or ineffective legal implications in India.”

Read on : http://www.dnaindia.com/india/1882048/report-4-15-million-emergency-calls-made-to-indian-children-s-safety-helpline-in-the-last-year

First Indian floating solar power station by 2014

DNA India, Aug 29, 2013

Following in the footsteps of Asian giants Japan and Singapore, this West Bengal capital may soon get India's first floating solar power station by 2014.

Such solar power stations comprise floating platforms (usually hexagonal)fitted with solar panels to generate more energy than land-based plants.

The brainchild of solar energy expert S.P. Gon Chaudhuri, the proposed sites for the maiden floating solar power station are ponds surrounding the iconic Victoria Memorial and some other water bodies in Kolkata.

"Such floating solar stations would generate more energy as research has shown that if the panels stay cooler, they generate more energy, up by 16 percent," Gon Chaudhuri told IANS.

According to him, applications have been forwarded to Victoria Memorial authorities and plans to utilise other areas near EM Bypass are also on the anvil.

"Each station would require around 3,000 square feet of space to generate 20 kilo watt of power. There are many water bodies that could be used for this," said Gon Chaudhury.

The research has been completed and the project, funded by Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, is expected to be implemented by 2014.

Source: http://www.dnaindia.com/india/1881594/report-first-indian-floating-solar-power-station-by-2014

Mother forces 14-year daughter to become pregnant

Monster mom gets her fourth child via 14-yr-old daughter

Appalling it may look, but it is true. A case of a 14-year-old girl having been exhorted by her mother to become pregnant by using syringes of donor sperm has come to light. Despite miscarriage, the teenager was repeatedly forced by her mother to take several attempts with donor sperms until she finally gave birth to baby boy, when she turned 17. The behaviour of the mother, who is serving a five-year jail term for “child cruelty”, was termed  “wicked and selfish”, defying belief, by High Court Judge Peter Jackson in his ruling on Monday. 

The judge said, the mother, an American divorcee living in Britian with three adopted children, hatched the devilish plan to get her daughter pregnant when she was prevented to adopt a fourth. She bought the syringes of sperm online over the internet form a Denmark-based company, Cryos International, Jackson said. The daughter, who is identified as A to guard her privacy, said, she became pregnant by donor sperm bought by her mother to provide her mother a fourth child. Though the daughter was initially shocked at her mother’s suggestion, she finally gave in to be able to gain “more love” for herself, she revealed.

“If I do this ... maybe she will love me more,” the daughter told the court in her statement.  The judge revealed that the mother had even asked her daughter to use douches of vinegar or lemon to increase her chances of having a girl.

Source:http://news24online.com/monster-mom-gets-her-fourth-child-via-14-yr-old-daughter_LatestNews24_17735.aspx#

Amazing facts about the human body

How many atoms are you made up of ?

It is hard to grasp just how small the atoms that make up your body are until you look at their sheer number: An adult is made up of around 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 Octillion) Atoms. (1 Octillion= 1000 trillion trillion).

Body weight & blood vessels

500g Fat = 11km blood vessels When you gain 500gm of fat, your body makes 11km of blood vessels. This means your body must work harder to pump blood through all of these extra new vessels, straining your heart. 
Fortunately, if you lose 500gm, your body will break down and re-absorb the unnecessary vessels.

Largest Molecule? Chromosome 1

It contains around 10 Billion atoms A normal human cell has 23 pairs of chromosomes in its nucleus, each a single, very long, molecule of DNA. Chromosome 1 is the biggest to pack in the amount of information that is encoded in the molecule.

Digestive system

Our digestive acids are strong enough to dissolve zinc. 
But cells in the stomach lining renew so quickly that the acids don't have time to dissolve it.

Eye muscles

The focusing muscles of the eyes move around 100,000 times a day to give your leg muscles the same workout, you would need to walk 80km every day.

How strong is human bone

 8.6 tonnes - That's how much one cubic inch of bone can support - That is four times as much as concrete can support 
Human bone is as strong as granite in supporting weight.

Skin - Largest organ in the body

The skin is the largest organ in the body. 
In an adult person, it covers about 20sq ft It constantly flakes away; each person sheds around 18kg in a lifetime.

What could kill you in space

In movies, a human body explodes if it is pushed into space without a suit. But it's mostly fiction. 
Although liquids do boil in a vacuum, your blood is kept under pressure by your circulatory system and would be just fine. It is lack of air that will kill you.

What shows you are sleep deprived

You are sleep deprived if you fall asleep within 5 minutes of hitting the sack. 
The ideal is between 10 and 15 minutes, meaning you're still tired enough to sleep deeply, but not so exhausted you feel sleepy during the day.

Source link: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/slideshows/science-technology/10-amazing-facts-about-the-human-body/how-many-atoms-are-you-made-up-of/slideshow/18303394.cms

A lesson in air safety: out in 90 seconds

Joe Sharkey, The New York Times | Updated: July 09, 2013 09:07 IST

Next time you're on a plane at takeoff or landing, watch the flight attendant in the jump seat, seemingly lost in thought. Is she idly wondering where she parked her the car at the airport or what's for dinner?

Not likely, said Leslie Mayo, a flight attendant for more than 26 years. Instead, that flight attendant is probably mentally running through "the 30-second review that's been drilled into our heads," she said.

"If you see some of us just sitting there looking out into space, we're probably actually reviewing those safety procedures. You're assessing the cabin. You're thinking, if there's an evacuation, who are my assistants going to be? Who's going to be the most helpful and calm in a situation where you really need help from passengers?" said Mayo, who is also a spokeswoman for the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, which represents more than 16,000 American Airlines flight attendants.

As investigators work to determine the cause (or, more likely, causes) of the crash of Asiana Flight 214 that killed two and injured 180 at San Francisco International Airport on Saturday, people with expertise in aviation safety, or with personal experience in aviation disasters, have been shaking their heads in wonder. How could so many have evacuated that airplane alive? And what can be learned about aviation safety from this incident?

Asiana flight attendants have won wide praise for their performance. Mayo and others are amazed that it took only about 90 seconds to get everyone off that plane, which was carrying 291 passengers and 16 crew. The evacuation was also aided by some passengers who by and large remained calm on an airplane that was on fire, filled with smoke, its tail section broken off, with several of its emergency evacuation slides malfunctioning.

For passengers, some basic lessons were firmly reinforced. These include following crew members' instructions in an emergency and the overall importance of what the safety experts call situational awareness. Routinely, on any flight, we should know exactly where those exit doors are that the flight attendants keep trying to point out during the usually ignored safety demonstrations. We should be asking ourselves, if an emergency occurred what would I do? If I'm in or near an exit row, can I open that door? 

Read on at NDTV page: http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/a-lesson-in-air-safety-out-in-90-seconds-389639?pfrom=home-topstories

Humans – the real threat to life on Earth

If population levels continue to rise at the current rate, our grandchildren will see the Earth plunged into an unprecedented environmental crisis, argues computational scientist Stephen Emmott in this extract from his book Ten Billion

Stephen Emmott

Saturday 29 June 2013

Earth is home to millions of species. Just one dominates it. Us. Our cleverness, our inventiveness and our activities have modified almost every part of our planet. In fact, we are having a profound impact on it. Indeed, our cleverness, our inventiveness and our activities are now the drivers of every global problem we face. And every one of these problems is accelerating as we continue to grow towards a global population of 10 billion. In fact, I believe we can rightly call the situation we're in right now an emergency – an unprecedented planetary emergency.

We humans emerged as a species about 200,000 years ago. In geological time, that is really incredibly recent. Just 10,000 years ago, there were one million of us. By 1800, just over 200 years ago, there were 1 billion of us. By 1960, 50 years ago, there were 3 billion of us. There are now over 7 billion of us. By 2050, your children, or your children's children, will be living on a planet with at least 9 billion other people. Some time towards the end of this century, there will be at least 10 billion of us. Possibly more.

We got to where we are now through a number of civilisation- and society-shaping "events", most notably the agricultural revolution, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution and – in the West – the public-health revolution. By 1980, there were 4 billion of us on the planet. Just 10 years later, in 1990, there were 5 billion of us. By this point initial signs of the consequences of our growth were starting to show. Not the least of these was on water. Our demand for water – not just the water we drank but the water we needed for food production and to make all the stuff we were consuming – was going through the roof. But something was starting to happen to water.

Back in 1984, journalists reported from Ethiopia about a famine of biblical proportions caused by widespread drought. Unusual drought, and unusual flooding, was increasing everywhere: Australia, Asia, the US, Europe. Water, a vital resource we had thought of as abundant, was now suddenly something that had the potential to be scarce.

By 2000 there were 6 billion of us. It was becoming clear to the world's scientific community that the accumulation of CO₂, methane and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – as a result of increasing agriculture, land use and the production, processing and transportation of everything we were consuming – was changing the climate. And that, as a result, we had a serious problem on our hands; 1998 had been the warmest year on record. The 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1998.

We hear the term "climate" every day, so it is worth thinking about what we actually mean by it. Obviously, "climate" is not the same as weather. The climate is one of the Earth's fundamental life support systems, one that determines whether or not we humans are able to live on this planet. It is generated by four components: the atmosphere (the air we breathe); the hydrosphere (the planet's water); the cryosphere (the ice sheets and glaciers); the biosphere (the planet's plants and animals). By now, our activities had started to modify every one of these components.

Our emissions of CO₂ modify our atmosphere. Our increasing water use had started to modify our hydrosphere. Rising atmospheric and sea-surface temperature had started to modify the cryosphere, most notably in the unexpected shrinking of the Arctic and Greenland ice sheets. Our increasing use of land, for agriculture, cities, roads, mining – as well as all the pollution we were creating – had started to modify our biosphere. Or, to put it another way: we had started to change our climate.

There are now more than 7 billion of us on Earth. As our numbers continue to grow, we continue to increase our need for far more water, far more food, far more land, far more transport and far more energy. As a result, we are accelerating the rate at which we're changing our climate. In fact, our activities are not only completely interconnected with but now also interact with, the complex system we live on: Earth. It is important to understand how all this is connected.

Let's take one important, yet little known, aspect of increasing water use: "hidden water". Hidden water is water used to produce things we consume but typically do not think of as containing water. Such things include chicken, beef, cotton, cars, chocolate and mobile phones. For example: it takes around 3,000 litres of water to produce a burger. In 2012 around five billion burgers were consumed in the UK alone. That's 15 trillion litres of water – on burgers. Just in the UK. Something like 14 billion burgers were consumed in the United States in 2012. That's around 42 trillion litres of water. To produce burgers in the US. In one year. It takes around 9,000 litres of water to produce a chicken. In the UK alone we consumed around one billion chickens in 2012. It takes around 27,000 litres of water to produce one kilogram of chocolate. That's roughly 2,700 litres of water per bar of chocolate. This should surely be something to think about while you're curled up on the sofa eating it in your pyjamas.

But I have bad news about pyjamas. Because I'm afraid your cotton pyjamas take 9,000 litres of water to produce. And it takes 100 litres of water to produce a cup of coffee. And that's before any water has actually been added to your coffee. We probably drank about 20 billion cups of coffee last year in the UK. And – irony of ironies – it takes something like four litres of water to produce a one-litre plastic bottle of water. Last year, in the UK alone, we bought, drank and threw away nine  billion plastic water bottles. That is 36 billion litres of water, used completely unnecessarily. Water wasted to produce bottles – for water. And it takes around 72,000 litres of water to produce one of the 'chips' that typically powers your laptop, Sat Nav, phone, iPad and your car. There were over two billion such chips produced in 2012. That is at least 145 trillion litres of water. On semiconductor chips. In short, we're consuming water, like food, at a rate that is completely unsustainable.

Demand for land for food is going to double – at least – by 2050, and triple – at least – by the end of this century. This means that pressure to clear many of the world's remaining tropical rainforests for human use is going to intensify every decade, because this is predominantly the only available land that is left for expanding agriculture at scale. Unless Siberia thaws out before we finish deforestation. By 2050, 1bn hectares of land is likely to be cleared to meet rising food demands from a growing population. This is an area greater than the US. And accompanying this will be three gigatons per year extra CO₂ emissions.If Siberia does thaw out before we finish our deforestation, it would result in a vast amount of new land being available for agriculture, as well as opening up a very rich source of minerals, metals, oil and gas. In the process this would almost certainly completely change global geopolitics. Siberia thawing would turn Russia into a remarkable economic and political force this century because of its newly uncovered mineral, agricultural and energy resources. It would also inevitably be accompanied by vast stores of methane – currently sealed under the Siberian permafrost tundra – being released, greatly accelerating our climate problem even further.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jun/30/population-growth-wipe-out-life-earth 

Boeing 777 plane crash-lands at San Francisco airport

A Boeing 777 aircraft has crash-landed at San Francisco international airport, killing two people and injuring dozens more, officials say.

More than 300 people were on Asiana Airlines Flight 214, from South Korea's capital, Seoul. Passengers and crew escaped down emergency slides as the plane burst into flames.

Asiana has confirmed two female Chinese teenagers have died in the crash.

The airline said mechanical problems did not cause the crash.

The two Chinese teenagers who died had been seated at the back of the aircraft, said Asiana, South Korea's second largest carrier.

They are believed to be the first-ever fatalities in a Boeing 777 crash.

"Currently we understand that there were no engine or mechanical problems," Asiana chief executive Yoon Young-Doo told a news conference in Seoul.

BBC News Link