Birthday Poem by Shruti

Birthday Poem by Shruti
Happy Birthday Peddayya!! This is the poem for you on your birthday

Happy birthday poem:

“A day full of love and heart

Enjoyed to the fullest with lots of fun

Also a time to wonder

About everything that matters

Treasuring the memories for years to come

And listening to the birds sing today

Brings deep joy to me

Seeing my family happy and together

Opens another chest of precious memories

There are no fissures I can see

All my troubles are as light as a feather

Blown away by a gentle breeze

I sit on my bed wondering

All the small things in life

These make my life complete

I thank god for everything, pondering

My life’s day, my birthday, a purpose

For lighting up other lives

With the light I worked hard for getting- the beauty of love and life.”

Lots of love

Shruti

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Class Struggle: India’s Experiment in Schooling Tests Rich and Poor

By GEETA ANAND

NEW DELHI—Instead of playing cricket with the kids in the alleyway outside, four-year-old Sumit Jha sweats in his family’s one-room apartment. A power cut has stilled the overhead fan. In the stifling heat, he traces and retraces the image of a goat.

In April, he enrolled in the nursery class of Shri Ram School, the most coveted private educational institution in India’s capital. Its students include the grandchildren of India’s most powerful figures—Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress party President Sonia Gandhi.

Sumit, on the other hand, lives in a slum.

Grand Experiment at Shri Ram School

Manpreet Romana for The Wall Street JournalKids sit under a board filled with artwork in a corridor of Shri Ram School in New Delhi.

His admission to Shri Ram is part of a grand Indian experiment to narrow the gulf between rich and poor that is widening as India’s economy expands. The Right to Education Act, passed in 2009, mandates that private schools set aside 25% of admissions for low-income, underprivileged and disabled students. In Delhi, families earning less than 100,000 rupees (about $2,500 a year) qualify.

Shri Ram, a nontraditional school founded in 1988, would seem well-suited to the experiment. Rather than drill on rote learning, as many Indian schools do, Shri Ram encourages creativity by teaching through stories, songs and art. In a typical class, two teachers supervise 29 students; at public schools nearby, one teacher has more than 50. Three times a day, a gong sounds and teachers and students pause for a moment of contemplation. Above the entrance, a banner reads, “Peace.”

Yet the most notable results so far are frustration and disappointment as the separations that define Indian society—between rich and poor, employer and servant, English-speaker and Hindi-speaker—are upended. This has led even some supporters of the experiment to conclude that the chasm between the top and bottom of Indian society is too great to overcome.

Shri Ram itself is challenging the law in the Supreme Court, arguing in part that the government exceeded its authority in imposing the quotas.

“We have a social obligation to bridge the gap between rich and poor,” says Manju Bharat Ram, Shri Ram’s founder. “But sometimes the gap is just too wide.”

The government feels a “just and humane” society can be achieved only through inclusive education, says Anshu Vaish of India’s Ministry of Human Resource Development, and private schools must do their part. Teachers will adapt, and the rich and poor will enrich each other’s learning, she says, adding that education is “an act of faith and social engineering—but not quick-fix social engineering.”

Manpreet Romana for The Wall Street JournalManika Sharma says she was jolted when the floor-sweeper from her home enrolled a child in the school where she is the principal.

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TwoIndiaJump

Sumit is struggling at Shri Ram. Teachers have called in his father, Mithalesh Kumar Jha, who earns $150 a month as a driver for an apparel executive, to complain that his son hits other kids and isn’t concentrating. Desperate for Sumit to get a good English-language education, Mr. Jha has responded by spanking his son and imposing an “all-work-and-no-play” routine.

Which is why Sumit sat on his bed recently, his mother hovering as he copied and recopied the day’s lesson: the Hindi letter “b,” and a picture of a bakri, or goat.

Sumit doesn’t complain. “Did you see the goat I drew?” he asks excitedly the next day at school. “I drew five pictures of the goat. My dad wanted me to draw more goats but I was too tired.”

Sumit’s father and many of the poorer parents are troubled by the fact that their own limited literacy prevents them from helping. Some wealthy parents, meanwhile, chafe at the slowed pace of learning. They have suggested segregating the poor kids.

And Shri Ram’s teachers complain that the poor, even at age four, are far behind in the fundamentals of learning and social skills. “The teachers have come into my office and broken down” in tears, says Manika Sharma, Shri Ram’s principal. “They say, ‘Help us. There is no learning happening for the other children. What we achieved in one week with kids before is taking three weeks.’ ”

Some parents, having encouraged their household staff to enroll their children, are also grappling with a profound change in the nature of their relationship with their servants.

Ms. Sharma, the 51-year-old principal, felt this jolt herself two years ago when Chan Kumari, a floor-mopper in her home, enrolled her son, Vipin, at Shri Ram. That’s when the school first adopted a similar quota for underprivileged kids under a local Delhi law, increasing it to 25% this year, when the federal Right to Education Act took effect.

“I was horrified. A parent in my school, mopping my floors—I just couldn’t handle it,” says Ms. Sharma. “I can’t sit across the table from someone who sweeps my floors.”

Ms. Kumari recalls apologizing: “I’m so sorry. I’ve made you angry. I shouldn’t have told you.”

Ms. Sharma says she reassured Ms. Kumari that she had done nothing wrong. She resolved the matter by giving Ms. Kumari a year’s salary to stay home with Vipin and her newborn girl.

Manpreet Romana for The Wall Street JournalVipin Kumar, right, the son of a sweeper, is a top student and one of the most popular kids in his class.

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TwoIndiaJump2

India is not a country overflowing with Horatio Alger stories. More typical are jarring juxtapositions of wealth and poverty far beyond anything found in the West.

With hired help so cheap, even middle-class households can have a staff of four or five—cooks, babysitters, drivers, maids. As the economy has grown, the lives of servants has improved. Many can afford relative luxuries like cellphones, for instance, something inconceivable a few years ago. Still, poor families typically live in slum apartments or shacks.

India has tried to create opportunities for its poorest, who are often among the lowest castes. Quota systems reserve government jobs for the poor, and at some colleges almost half the seats are set aside for minorities. Affirmative-action policies like these have fueled resentment among some who feel quotas make it unfairly difficult for their own children to get ahead.

Nationwide, about 237 million children attend elementary or high school, according to government figures. It’s tough to get a precise breakdown of public- versus private-school attendance, but in first through eighth grades 130 million are enrolled in government schools and 57 million in private ones, according to India’s District Information System for Education.

India’s government-run school system is a shambles, undermined by teacher absences and a lack of investment. That drives families who can afford it to private schools.

This year, Shri Ram accepted 84 out of the 2,288 applications from its traditional, non-poor students—a 3.7% acceptance rate, even lower than Harvard College’s.

Shri Ram charges fee-paying students about $1,500 a year. For each poor child, the government pays $300 a year, the cost of educating a child in a public school.

Many of the world’s top private schools offer scholarships to smart poor kids. But India’s plan is more sweeping: It reserves a quarter of admissions for underprivileged kids. Rules prohibit admission-testing of students, rich or poor, although private schools can set some parameters, such as nearness to the school or gender.

On March 4, Mr. Jha, Sumit’s dad, showed up at Shri Ram for the lottery to see if his son would be picked. Sumit had already failed to win a spot at six other private schools.

“I was saying, ‘God has forgotten me,’ ” Mr. Jha says.

But this time, Sumit’s name was pulled from a hat. His tearful father applauded.

A few weeks later, parents of the 112 children admitted to the nursery class arrived for orientation at the four-story school, set among the gated homes of the wealthy Vasant Vihar neighborhood. Affluent parents stepped out of chauffeur-driven sedans and SUVs. Low-income parents arrived on foot or bicycles. Poor women covered their heads with their paloos, the free ends of their saris, in the conservative fashion of parts of rural north India.

The parents were ushered into classrooms and seated on a red carpet. Sitting in a circle with fellow parents from such vastly different backgrounds left Bhavna Singh, one of the well-to-do mothers, uncomfortable. “Everyone knew this was happening, but seeing them is a different kind of thing,” she says.

Soon after, Ms. Singh visited the principal, Ms. Sharma. “If they want to do it to improve the country, fine,” Ms. Singh recalls saying. “But they should segregate the poor kids until they get up to par.”

Many parents have similar complaints. “I don’t blame them,” Ms. Sharma says. “There’s no denying the reality that their kids’ learning will be slowed.”

One recent morning, teachers Sujata Gupta and Shilki Sawhney asked their class of four-year-olds to name examples of purple things. The rich kids shouted out “blackberries,” “blackcurrant ice cream” and “potassium permanganate,” a chemical used to clean fruits and vegetables.

None of the seven low-income kids raised their hands. Unlike the wealthier children, they hadn’t learned their colors at home, spoke no English, and were further confused by examples of things they had never heard of.

The teachers, repeating everything in Hindi for the poor kids, then asked anyone wearing a purple T-shirt to stand. Nitin Raj, saucer-eyed and wearing green, rose.

“He’s not understanding at all,” Ms. Gupta said.

After nine days of studying the letter “a,” drawing objects beginning with the sound and writing the letter on work sheets, Nitin still doesn’t connect the sound with the letter, according to Ms. Gupta.

Ms. Sawhney pulled aside Nitin and seven other kids (five poor, two rich) having trouble with their vowels for a remedial session. Afterward, the teachers called in their parents.

“Nitin needs extra help,” Ms. Gupta recalls telling his mother, Manju Raj. The school would be giving him additional homework, she said, and urged Ms. Raj to sit down with her boy every day to help him. If she couldn’t, the teachers said, Ms. Raj should hire a tutor.

Meanwhile, the teachers said they had no choice but to move forward teaching the rest of the alphabet or risk missing their goal for the class: reading simple words, like “cat,” by year’s end.

Nitin, whose father earns about $150 a month driving for a shoe-factory owner, lives in a slum along an alley thick with files. He shares a tidy one-room apartment with his parents and 12-year-old brother, Rohit.

Shri Ram is a world apart from his brother’s public school. Fifty-seven kids cram into Rohit’s eighth-grade classroom. Teachers are frequently absent. One recent morning, broken glass filled one side of the playground and pupils, lacking desks, sat on the classroom floor.

“All I want is for my boy to get an education so he doesn’t have to become a driver like his dad,” Ms. Raj says of Nitin. She’s been looking for a tutor, but can’t find one in her slum. She is worried because neither she nor her husband speak or write English well enough to help him.

Sumit’s dad, Mr. Jha, deals with similar constraints. He has a 10th-grade education, and he finds himself learning new things from his four-year-old.

Sitting cross-legged on the family bed that occupies half of their one-room home recently, Mr. Jha pointed to the letter “a” his son had written, and then at a picture below of a man wearing a uniform.

“This is an aadmi,” Hindi for man, Mr. Jha says.

“No, daddy,” the boy replies. “That is an astronaut.”

“What is an astronaut?” asks Mr. Jha in Hindi.

“They fly high in the sky,” the boy says.

It was the first Mr. Jha had heard of space travel.

Sumit is lucky. The family that his father works for tutors him on weekends.

But some wealthy parents consider it counter-productive for the poor kids to attend at all. Radhika Bharat Ram, who has two children in the school, and is the daughter-in-law of its founder, says she discouraged her tailor from enrolling his child because the lives of the rich and poor are so different that the poor children suffer feelings of deprivation.

Despite that advice, Raj Kumar, 39, who earns about $130 a month and lives in a mud hut, says he couldn’t resist the opportunity for his son, Ritik.

“I saw their kids’ discipline and behavior,” he says of the Bharat Ram family. “I wished my kids could learn like them.”

His son and Ms. Bharat Ram’s son are now classmates.

During a recent book fair, Ritik begged his dad for money to buy three titles. That prompted Mr. Kumar to call Ms. Bharat Ram to ask for funds. Instead, he got a lecture.

“Right now it’s books he wants, but what are you going to do when he wants a car?” she recalls telling him. She found old copies of the same books at home to give to Ritik.

Shalini Tandon, a teacher at Shri Ram, knows well the obstacles poor kids face. Two years ago, she encouraged her driver to enroll his son, Rajesh Kumar, after Rajesh’s mother was burned to death by villagers in his hometown who thought she was a witch.

At school, Rajesh spent months sitting under a table. To help him, Ms. Tandon started paying for tutoring and began serving as an intermediary between the boy’s teachers and his father—a frustrating role.

“Often [the dad] sends Rajesh to school in the same dirty clothes for days. I tell him to wash his clothes,” Ms. Tandon says. “The boy comes to school covered with mosquito bites. No wonder he’s sleeping through class.”

The father, who earns about $130 a month, says he does the best he can as a single parent.

The school moved Rajesh down a grade after his disastrous first year. He’s seven years old and in kindergarten with five-year-olds—but doing much better. This might suggest a model for other kids, but the Right to Education Act forbids holding children back a grade.

Vipin, the son of the principal’s former floor-mopper, shows the potential of India’s experiment. He is now the top student in his 2nd grade class. Rich and poor kids vie to sit next to him. Vipin’s friends from wealthier families beg for him to attend their birthday parties.

Vipin’s mother, Ms. Kumari, was reluctant accept the party invitations. “I told the teacher that I feel so small in front of these rich families,” she says.

However, prodded by her son, his teachers and the mother of Vipin’s best friend, Arman, she relented.

Arman’s mother, Vandana Ghosh, says at first her son seemed uncomfortable around Vipin and other poor kids, saying they acted differently. But within weeks, Arman began telling her all the things he was learning from Vipin.

Arman says Vipin taught him how to make toy guns out of paper and construct secret hiding places for things in his desk. “I love playing football with Vipin,” Arman says.

This year when he was planning his seventh birthday party, Arman says, he told his mom to make sure Vipin came.

Ms. Ghosh says Vipin’s parents insisted to her that they couldn’t, saying they were from very different backgrounds. “I told them the kids like Vipin very much—they don’t think of him as being different,” Ms. Ghosh says.

Ms. Kumari gave in. Recently, she paid about $1 to hire a motorized rickshaw for the ride to the party. She gave Vipin $2 or so to choose a gift. He bought a pack of colored pencils.

Ms. Kumari struggles to explain why her son is such a star in school. She doesn’t speak English, so she can’t help with studies. But she does what she can: Every day, she clears their one-room home of family members so Vipin can do homework undisturbed.

She also took the school’s suggestion to pay a tutor to help Vipin for an hour each day, at $10 a month. The $180 or so her husband earns per month as a cook is about 20% more than the typical salaries of maids and drivers. Thus, tutoring is a sacrifice but not unrealistic.

Seven-year-olds don’t carry the burdens their parents might. Sitting with his mother, baby sister and two other relatives on the floor of his apartment, Vipin opens his eyes wide at the memory of the party. It was “a lot of fun,” he says, oblivious to his mother’s worries.

He also remembers a play date at Arman’s house. “It was the most beautiful house I have ever seen,” Vipin says. “It was like the Taj Mahal. There were many, many rooms and many, many floors.”

“If you study hard, you can get a good job and live in a house like that, too,” his mother tells him.

—Diksha Sahni contributed to this article.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704083904576337373758647478.html

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Neuroscientists unite for ‘Moon shot’

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110526/full/news.2011.324.html

Effort aims to bring together philanthropies with common interest in brain diseases.

Heidi Ledford

brainMoves are afoot to reduce the focus on disease-specific research in favour of more fundamental work.Glowimages

Fifty years after US President John F. Kennedy pledged to send a man to the Moon, his nephew Patrick has brought together leading lights of neuroscience to tackle the “inner space” of the human brain.

At a meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, this week, the former Democratic congressman from Rhode Island helped to launch an initiative called ‘One Mind for Research’, which aims to boost support for neuroscience. Kennedy and his collaborators hope to convince funders to relax their focus on individual diseases in favour of supporting basic research on the fundamental workings of the brain.

The effort comes at a crucial juncture for the field. Even as technological advances in imaging techniques and stem-cell-derived disease models hold out the tantalizing possibility of new advances, neuroscientists, like other biomedical researchers, face the threat of cuts to federal research funding.

Meanwhile, researchers have watched as one pharmaceutical company after another has stopped research on diseases that affect the central nervous system. “They are exiting brain sciences as ‘too difficult’, just at a time when we’re about to make it easier for them,” said Steven Hyman, provost of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the conference on Monday.

How One Mind for Research will change this landscape, however, remains unclear. Kennedy and his collaborators have enlisted the support of top academic and political players, including US Vice President Joe Biden, who delivered a keynote address yesterday. But some researchers expressed unease at the idea of blending their research goals with political rhetoric. And thus far the programme is long on lofty goals and short on specifics.

“The key question is, what’s next?” says Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. “What’s the agenda?”

Personal connections

One Mind for Research has its roots in a charity now called the International Mental Health Research Organization (IMHRO), which has been holding music festivals to fund research into neuropsychiatric diseases since 1995. The charity,founded by Shari and Garen Staglin after they learned that their son had schizophrenia, is part of a fragmented community of advocates for neuropsychiatric disease research. Insel estimates that there are about 50 disease-specific advocacy groups that lobby his institute for funding.

Over time, the Staglins realized that this fragmentary system was inefficient.

Disparate brain disorders sometimes share features, such as inflammation, meaning that a disease-specific focus could lead to duplication of effort. Nevertheless, uniting the charities under one umbrella is difficult, says Shari Staglin, because each organization wants to maintain its own stable of prized donors, and those donors — many motivated by personal tragedies — often want their funds to go to understanding the specific disease that has affected their lives.

But those barriers began to fall when the Staglins joined forces with Kennedy and enlisted the support of celebrities including actress Glenn Close and actor Martin Sheen. Kennedy, who has himself struggled with depression and substance abuse, has long had an interest in mental health and has worked to boost the coverage of mental-health therapies by medical insurance companies.

On message

At the meeting on Tuesday, Garen Staglin outlined a few of the programme’s early ambitions to develop research tools, including a registry of patient records and tissue samples. Staglin says he hopes to build a repository of up to one million samples and, eventually, full genome sequences to accompany each.

Another goal is to launch an aggressive fund-raising campaign. The meeting emphasized issues that resonate with the public, such as the plight of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who have faced high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries. “These ‘wounded warriors’ provide an opportunity to highlight the struggle faced by everyone who suffers from mental illness,” says Kennedy. “The American people are paying attention to the fact that these soldiers are falling through the cracks.”

In July, the initiative will hold a meeting of business leaders in the health-care industry. The hope, says Husseini Manji, global head of neuroscience research and development at Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceuticals, headquartered in New Brunswick, New Jersey, is to get the attendees to commit to contributing resources — either cash or technical expertise — for developing collaborative projects that could spur the early stages of drug research.

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The details of that collaboration are still fuzzy, but Manji, who is heading up the effort, says it may include finding new uses for existing drugs. Manji envisions an agreement modelled on the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, a public–private partnership that forgoes intellectual property rights on its discoveries in favor of rapidly depositing results in public databases.

But that model will not be enough, he cautions, and he hopes to create an additional One Mind programme that would allow companies to retain patent rights. “If you don’t do that, companies will just dump their rejected compounds into the pile,” he says. “And we want researchers to get access to industry’s best leads.”

Manji has already presented his goals to several industry groups. He admits that there are signs of ‘consortium fatigue’, but says that One Mind’s high-profile backers have nevertheless attracted interest.

Meanwhile, Insel is cautiously optimistic about the programme. “I don’t know where this is going, but it is a great concept,” he says. “Funding for the National Institutes of Health is not going up at this point, so we’ve got to start thinking about what else we can do.”

 

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http://academicearth.org/

Thanks to Academic Earth, a friggin’ gift, you can follow (video) lectures given at universities like Stanford, MIT, Harvard & Yale on some of the most popular subjects. There once was a time when you couldn’t wait to get out of school, I suppose it makes sense to have a time where you’d do anything to learn new things.

Especially things you choose. And only those subjects you really like (did anyone say obligated French?).

The videos include all sort of subjects, such as Computer Science (/love), Mathematics, Engineering, … all explained by well-respected professors.

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Ont. teen wins top prize for cystic fibrosis discovery

 

 

CTV.ca News Staff

Updated: Thu. May. 12 2011 6:35 PM ET

A promising discovery has been made that could one day help in the fight against cystic fibrosis — and the researcher behind it is just 16 years old.

Toronto-area high school student Marshall Zhang took first place this week at a national science contest for developing what could become a new drug cocktail to treat patients with CF, a genetic disorder that affects the lungs and digestive system.

Zhang, a Grade 11 student in Richmond Hill, Ont., used the Canadian SCINET supercomputing network at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto to identify how two compounds interacted with a protein on a mutant gene that’s responsible for most cases of CF, called Delta F508.

Using the computer modeling, he looked at what these compounds might do at the molecular level to “correct” the genetic defect that marks CF. He found that two drugs each interacted with different parts of the mutant protein and then worked together in a whole new way as well.

“Originally, I thought it would be a ‘one plus one equals two’ kind of thing, but when we got our results back from the lab, it actually turned out that one plus one equals three. The two compounds were working together synergistically to correct that disease-causing defect,” Zhang told CTV’s Canada AM Thursday

“But beyond that, I’ve also laid a foundation for future structure-based drug design, in identifying certain chemical structures that have a key role in correcting that defect.”

Zhang’s discovery on the computer was the first step. Proving his ‘virtual’ findings using living cells in culture was the next step.

To his surprise, he discovered that his hypothesis was correct: the cells that were treated with both compounds were able to function as if they were healthy cells. Zhang was stunned to find that his experiment worked on the first try.

“A lot of the time, you make your hypothesis, you do your experiment and a lot of the times, it doesn’t work out,” he says.

Zhang really needed his hypothesis to bear out quickly because he only had enough time to try the experiment once. So he was delighted when it worked.

“It was just like ‘Wow’. You don’t believe what you’re seeing. It was amazing. It’s really rare for an experiment to work on the first time,” he said.

While the serendipitous finding is exciting, it remains to be seen whether it translates into living humans. Zhang notes that oftentimes, the way something works in cells cultured in a lab ends up being much different from the way it works in humans.

“We would have to test for toxicity and how the human body metabolizes all these compounds. Certainly, while this is a first step for these two compounds, it’s a long way from developing these drugs,” he said, noting that any resulting drug is probably 15 years down the pipeline.

“But I think what’s more important about my project is laying the foundation for identifying these chemical structures that we might be able to use on different compounds in the future.”

Zhang’s project mentor Dr. Christine Bear, a researcher at the Hospital for Sick Children’s Research Institute, says Zhang’s findings show that computational methods can drive the discovery of compounds that lay the groundwork for drug development.

“I think that Marshall has tremendous potential to be a scientist in the future because of his intelligence, motivation and determination,” Dr. Bear said in a statement.

Zhang’s discovery so impressed eight scientists at the National Research Council of Canada laboratories in Ottawa, they awarded him first prize today in the 2011 Sanofi-Aventis BioTalent Challenge.

Zhang earned $5,000 for his first-place finish, a prize he will now share with his school, Bayview Secondary School in Richmond Hill.

He will go on to compete against American and Australian teams at an international challenge in Washington, called the International BioGENEius Challenge, in late June.

“That’s going to be really exciting,” he said.

Video link http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews//20110512/zhang-cystic-fibrosis-science-prize-110512/

 

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Dilbert

Globe and Mail, By: Scott Adams, Section: Business, Page: B2

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Jelly’s Poem to her Mother on mothers’s day

” A HUNDRED ROSES WILL BLOOM EVERY DAY,

THOUSANDS OF SUNSET WILL DEBUT,

BILLIONS OF STARS WILL TWINKLE AWAY,

BUT THERE IS NO OTHER MOM LIKE “” YOU””.

JELLY  , MAY8TH ,2011

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Students design solar-powered autoclave

Article from 03.05.2011 

 

HOUSTON, May 3

Students at a U.S. university say sun power could sterilize medical instruments, helping solve a longstanding health issue for developing countries.Engineering students at Rice University have fashioned a sterilizing autoclave using a Capteur Soliel, a device created decades ago by French inventor to capture the energy of the sun in places where electricity — or fuel of any kind — is hard to get, a university release reported Tuesday.

Students at a U.S. university say sun power could sterilize medical instruments, helping solve a longstanding health issue for developing countries.

Engineering students at Rice University have fashioned a sterilizing autoclave using a Capteur Soliel, a device created decades ago by French inventor to capture the energy of the sun in places where electricity — or fuel of any kind — is hard to get, a university release reported Tuesday.

The Capteur Soleil is a steel A-frame with a bed of curved mirrors beneath the frame that produce steam by focusing sunlight along a steel tube at the frame’s apex.

The Rice researchers use the steam to heat a custom-designed conductive hotplate in an insulated box to create an autoclave.

«It basically becomes a stovetop, and you can heat anything you need to,» said Sam Major, a member of the team with seniors Daniel Rist, David Luker and William Dunk. “As long as the autoclave reaches 121 Celsius (250 F) for 30 minutes (the standard set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), everything should be sterile, and we’ve found we’re able to do that pretty easily.

«We put about an inch of water inside, followed by the basket with the tools and syringes,» Major said. «We’ve used some biological spores from a test kit, steamed them, and then incubated them for 24 hours and they came back negative for biological growth. That means we killed whatever was in there.»

«This is really the latest iteration of a much larger project,» said the team’s faculty adviser Doug Schuler. «We already have a version of the Capteur Soleil being used in Haiti for cooking, but we felt it could do more.»

upi

HOUSTON, May 3: Students design solar-powered autoclave » Life » News

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Family Pictures

My family pictures. This was taken during last Christmas. We had a blast with so many kids.

Dec 2011 bllast

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Plan C [Recipients of B.C. Income Assistance]


This plan provides 100% coverage of eligible prescription costs for B.C. residents receiving medical benefits and income assistance through the Ministry of Housing and Social Development.

If you would like more information on these benefits, contact your local office of the Ministry of Housing and Social Development.

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