By Mohammad Sajjad Akhtar Payami [ 1931-2013] The news of sad demise of Akhtar Payami on 8 April 2013 in Karachi brought a different kind of memory to the people of Bihar. Karachi people remembered this Bihari muhajir as a towering journalist associated with the Morning News and Dawn. His protégé and colleagues in these newspapers remember him as their mentor with expertise in toning down the stories to avert the state repression as Payami had worked during the days of strict censorship under the Bhutto regime. Payami’s colleagues admire him for his vast knowledge about the ideologies... 

  Zuckerberg: ‘let in talent freely’! The billionaire founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has launched a new initiative to push for immigration reform, describing America’s current system as “unfit for today’s world.” The group, called FWD.us, (pronounced Forward US), is backed by other Silicon Valley leaders including Google chairman Eric Schmidt, Yahoo boss Marissa Mayer and Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of Linkedin. “We have a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants. And it’s a policy unfit for today’s world,”... 

  Afghanistan: the future to avoid! New Delhi: With the US withdrawal from Afghanistan coming closer, neighbouring countries are hedging against bad outcomes in that part of the world. The jitteriness is palpable, with Afghanistan’s neighbours all tying up with each other in different combinations as they scramble to contain what many fear a Taliban surge supported by Pakistan and extremism/terrorism spilling over its borders. China is teaming up with Russia and Pakistan on a trilateral on Afghanistan, and the first meeting is scheduled in a few weeks. This comes weeks after India, Russia... 

  iPhone microscope: useful in remote sites! In a discovery that provides doctors in remote areas with an alternative, scientists recently created a microscope using an iPhone, tape, flashlight and camera lens. They then used it to diagnose intestinal worms in about 200 students in Pemba Island, off Tanzania’s eastern coast. “To our knowledge, this is the first time the mobile phone microscope had been used in the field to diagnose intestinal parasitic infections,” said Isaac Bogoch, an internal medicine specialist at Toronto General Hospital. Bogoch, who conducted the study... 

    An ad for clinical trials! New Delhi: As many as 436 people died last year due to serious adverse events (SAE) during clinical trials. Investigations are now on to ascertain how many of the deaths were caused by drugs administered to the trial subjects. Union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said on Friday that deaths could be due to life-threatening diseases such as cancer, heart failure and stroke or side-effects of the drugs or their administration to critically or terminally-ill patients. “Such deaths are investigated to arrive at the causal relationship, if any,”... 

    How the meteor looked! With a blinding flash and a booming shock wave, a meteor blazed across the western Siberian sky and exploded with the force of 20 atomic bombs, injuring more than 1000 people as it blasted out windows and spread panic in a city of 1 million. At least 112 people have been seriously hurt among the 1100 injured, according to the Interior Ministry. About 200 children who had been at schools were among the hurt from flying glass and debris. While NASA estimated the meteor was only about the size of a bus and weighed an estimated 7000 tons, the fireball it produced... 

  Newly born university: book capital! Singapore has decided to donate a library to the upcoming Nalanda International University in Bihar. Singapore will design, build and donate a state-of-the-art library, estimated to cost $5-7 million to the university, former foreign minister of Singapore George Yeo told reporters ahead of a Nalanda Monitoring Committee meeting in Rajgir in Nalanda district, about 100 km from here. Yeo, who heads the international advisory panel for raising funds for the university, said the board led by Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen that met in Patna Monday approved... 

Ramanujan: yesterday’s conjectures, today’s proofs! Mysore: An American mathematician claims to have come up with a proof for one of the last conjectures, Srinivasa Ramanujan had scribbled in his deathbed in 1920. In the last letter to G H Hardy, a British mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan had referred to mock theta functions, which has found applications in cancer research, polymer sciences, Lie theory and other fields of mathematics and physics. Ramanujan in the letter had defined mock-theta functions. “I have not proved rigorously that it (mock-theta functions) is necessarily... 

  By Dev N Pathak   Anura, ‘Invasion’ (Photo by Dev Pathak) ‘The State had us believe that it was celestial violence, it was divine providence; and we feel sick that we believed in state-sponsored ideas; now we are patients with disease’, says Jagath Weerasinghe, the eminent artist and archeologist from Sri Lanka, while he takes the viewers on a tour of his work at Espace Gallery, in New Delhi on 10 December 2012.The exhibition of the contemporary visual art from Sri Lanka titled ‘Narratives of Resistance’ is literal as well as metaphorical. Jagath’s work titled ‘Soldier’... 

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