Category: Life & Style

Under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, the Union Ministry of Education has come up with a plan to create unique ID numbers for school students across India. The ‘One Nation One Student ID’ called Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry (APAAR) will be for every student, from pre-primary to higher education. This is in addition to the 12-digit Aadhaar ID that every student has.

The APAAR ID, an Education Ecosystem Registry or edulocker, is to be treated as a lifelong ID number and will track students’ academic journey and achievements.

The Union Ministry has directed all states and Union Territories to begin the process of creating APAAR IDs for students. APAAR and National Credit Framework will be the QR code for learners across India and register every skill the students pick up.

The state school education department has asked educational institutions to organise a meeting of parents and teachers between October 16 and 18 to discuss the importance of creating the APAAR ID.

Data captured on the Aadhaar ID will be the basis of the APAAR ID. While parents’ consent will be required, the government has assured the data will stay confidential and shared only with government agencies, where required. Parents who give their consent can withdraw it any time. After the consent, it becomes the school’s responsibility to upload the same on the central Unified District and Information System for Education Plus portal.

A family’s quest to find a missing gold earring in Norway led its members to well-preserved artifacts from the Viking era in their garden, piquing the interest of the Cultural Heritage of Vestfold and Telemark County Council and shedding new light on the history of Jomfruland, Norway.

The Aasvik Family in Jomfruland stumbled upon relics dating back more than 1,000 years when they activated their metal detector. Settlements have existed on Jomfruland for many years. It is believed that the island was inhabited during the Viking era, but evidence previously extended only to the early Middle Ages. The recent discovery confirms this belief.

The family discovered a very well-preserved bowl-shaped buckle and another item that matches both in dating and style. Researchers believe the discovery to be the preserved grave of a woman buried there in the 800s.

The Cultural Heritage of Vestfold and Telemark County Council praised the family for their responsible actions in contacting the authorities and sharing the news of their discovery. The council’s Facebook post highlighted the historical significance of the find and included a series of images showcasing the relics and the family responsible for the discovery.

To own a car in Singapore, a buyer must bid for a certificate that now costs $106,000, as a post-pandemic recovery has driven up the cost of its vehicle quota system to record highs.

The city-state has a 10-year “certificate of entitlement” (COE) system. Introduced in 1990, the COE controls the number of vehicles in the country, which is home to 5.9 million people and can be covered by road in less than an hour.

The quota, offered through a bidding process, has made it the most expensive city in the world to buy a car, with the COE more than quadrupling from 2020 prices for a large car on October 4 to S$146,002 ($106,376.68).

Besides COE, registration fees and taxes, a new standard Toyota Camry Hybrid currently costs S$251,388 ($183,000) in Singapore – much higher than $28,855 in the US and a small, government-subsidised flat in the city-state at about S$125,000.

In 2020, when fewer people in Singapore were driving, the price of COEs dropped to about S$30,000. A post-COVID increase in economic activity has led to more car purchases, with the total number of vehicles on the road capped at about 950,000. The number of new COEs available depends on how many older cars are deregistered.

Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman (Medicine); Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier (Physics); Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov (Chemistry); Jon Fosse (Literature); and Claudia Goldin (Economics) are the winners of Nobel Prize for 2023.

The US-based duo of Hungarian-born Kariko and American Weissman won the Nobel Prize in Physiology on October 2 for research that led directly to the first mRNA vaccines to fight COVID-19. They began researching this in the late 1990s and published a key finding in 2005. Their research enabled the development of COVID-19 vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna.

The trio of Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier won the prize in physics on October 3 for conducting experiments that produced pulses of light so short that they were measured in attoseconds, i.e. one-billionth of one-billionth of a second. Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov won the award in chemistry on October 4 for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots, which can pave the way for the development of flexible electronics, tiny sensors, thinner solar cells and encrypted quantum communication.

Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize in Literature on October 5. Iranian rights activist Narges Mohammadi has won the Nobel Peace Prize, and Claudia Goldin won Nobel in Economics for studying women in the workforce.

Scientists from the University of Southern California have discovered a sixth basic sense the human tongue can feel – ammonium chloride. Their research published in the journal Nature Communications on October 5 suggests that protein receptors on the tongue that help detect the sour taste also respond to ammonium chloride, which is a popular ingredient in some Scandinavian candies.

Salt licorice has been a popular candy in some northern European countries at least since the early 20th century and its ingredients consist of salmiak salt, or ammonium chloride.

The recent research uncovered the protein OTOP1, which plays a vital role in detecting sour tastes. It functions as a channel for hydrogen ions when exposed to acidic sour foods, like lemonade and vinegar. The team hypothesised that ammonium chloride might also activate OTOP1 due to its impact on hydrogen ion concentration within cells.

The research then introduced the gene responsible for the OTOP1 receptor into lab-grown human cells, allowing them to produce the OTOP1 receptor. These cells were then exposed to ammonium chloride exposure. The study found that ammonium chloride strongly activated the OTOP1 channel, leading to a rise in pH and fewer hydrogen ions. This pH difference led to an influx of hydrogen ions through OTOP1, detectable through changes in electrical conductivity across the channel.

Singapore has become the newest and sixth member of the Blue Zone – an elite club of regions in the world where people live healthier and longer lives – according to Dan Buettner, a journalist and researcher who popularised the use of the term.

Regions in the Blue Zone have several traits in common that let them achieve longevity. The traits include moving regularly, depending on a plant-based diet, and living with purpose.

The original five Blue Zone regions are Okinawa in Japan, Sardina in Italy, Ikaria in Greece, Nicoya in Costa Rica, and Loma Linda in California.

Unlike the original five regions, which developed organically through practices and traditions, and managed to flourish over the years, Singapore is a ‘manufactured city,’ described Buettner in the Netflix documentary, Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones.

According to the latest government data for 2022, life expectancy in Singapore stands at 80.7 years for men and 85.2 years for women. The researcher underlined government policies, such as transportation, housing, and hawker centres, to have come together to create a ‘Blue Zone 2.0’ in the Southeast Asian city-state.

More than 80% of Singapore’s population lives in high-rise public housing apartment blocks. These estates have been intentionally designed to encourage social interaction among residents. The Singapore Government also has in place a housing grant, which encourages couples buying resale apartments on the open market to allow them to live with or near their parents or children.

Indians are in a race to buy luxury homes at 10 times the price under a revived project on Dubai’s Palm Islands, says a Bloomberg report.

In September, investors and brokers were spotted outside the sales centre of Nakheel PJSC where five-to-seven bedroom villas are being sold on the yet-undeveloped Palm Jebel Ali. Luxury homes here start at 18.7 million dirhams ($5.1 million), which is an estimated Rs 42.21 crore. The cheapest plots of land are available at about 40 million dirhams (Rs 90.30 crore approx).

The media report said that luxury real estate has revived tremendously even as Dubai became the number 1 in global rankings in the second quarter for transactions of homes valued at $10 million or above, according to real estate consultancy Knight Frank.

The report added that buyers will have to pay 20% of the villa’s value upfront and another 40% during construction. The remaining amount is to be paid when the properties are complete in 2027.

In 2003, Nakheel began selling residential properties on the Palm Jebel Ali for between 1.8 million dirhams (Rs 4.06 crore approx) and 5.6 million dirhams (Rs 12.64 crore approx). While these properties were resold many times later, not a single house was constructed.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has announced the funding and building of one of the largest computing systems dedicated to nonprofit life science research in the world. The effort will provide the scientific community with access to predictive models of healthy and diseased cells, leading to groundbreaking new discoveries that could help cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of this century.

The high-performance computing cluster, which is planned to comprise more than 1,000 GPUs, will enable artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models for biomedicine at scale. AI models could predict how an immune cell responds to an infection, like what happens at the cellular level when a child is born with a rare disease, or how a patient’s body will respond to a new medication.

In a statement, CZI Co-founder and Co-CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that AI is creating new opportunities in biomedicine, and building a high-performance computing cluster dedicated to life science research will accelerate progress on important scientific questions about how our cells work. “Developing digital models capable of predicting all cell types and cell states from the genome will help researchers better understand our cells and how they behave in health and disease,” he added.

The oldest-known aquarium fish tanked at the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco Bay Area for the past 85 years is 92 years, announced the California Academy of Sciences in September. A cutting-edge DNA analysis found the age of the female Australian lungfish, Methuselah.

The analysis was led by researchers of two Australia-based government agencies.

The 4-foot long, 40-pound Methuselah, named after the oldest person mentioned in the Bible, came at the aquarium via a Matson Navigation Company shipping liner in 1938. The fish earned its name ‘lungfish,’ as it distinguishes itself from most fish by its ability to respire air without relying on gills – an adaptation that shows its resilience and evolutionary significance.

The Australian lungfish is designated as a vulnerable species in its native habitat. The Government of Australia underlies its importance as the last surviving member of a fish family that has endured since the era of dinosaurs, with fossil records tracing its existence back 100 million years. This unique fish species also boasts substantial size, typically weighing around 88 pounds.

Geoscientists have discovered the eighth continent on planet Earth. After almost 375 years, a team of geologists and seismologists has created a newly refined map of Zealandia or Te Riu-a-Maui. The researchers found it by using the data obtained from dredged rock samples recovered from the ocean floor. The details of the research have been published in the journal Tectonics.

Zealandia is a continent of 1.89 million sq miles (4.9 million sq km) – around six times the size of Madagascar. It is 94% underwater, with just a handful of islands, similar to New Zealand, says Andy Tulloch, a geologist at the New Zealand Crown Research Institute GNS Science, and a member of the team that discovered Zealandia.

Scientists are now studying collections of rocks and sediment samples brought up from the ocean bed, most of which came from drilling sites; others came from the shores of islands in the area.

The newly refined map shows not only the location of the magmatic arc axis of the Zealandia continent, but also other major geological features.

Zealandia was originally part of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana, which was formed about 550 million years ago and essentially lumped together all the land in the southern hemisphere.