Feature Article

India’s science and technology policies advocate increased investment in research and development. However, in 2017–18, the tax incentive for company expenditure on R&D was reduced. This is likely to have major ramifications for R&D at a time when India’s domestic research effort is already in decline.

Road traffic fatalities constitute 16.6% of all deaths, making this the sixth leading cause of death in India, and a major contributor to socio-economic losses, the disability burden, and hospitalisation. An attempt to measure catastrophic levels of health expenditure on accidental injuries, road traffic accidents, and falls, finds that the burden of out-of-pocket expenditure is the highest for such injuries. The financial burden is particularly high for poorer households in rural areas, and those seeking treatment at private health facilities with no health insurance.

Nitrogen availability is a pivotal control on terrestrial carbon sequestration and global climate change. Historical and contemporary views assume that nitrogen enters Earth’s land-surface ecosystems from the atmosphere. Here we demonstrate that bedrock is a nitrogen source that rivals atmospheric nitrogen inputs across major sectors of the global terrestrial environment.

Euthanasia or assisted suicide (EAS) of psychiatric patients is increasing in some jurisdictions such as Belgium and the Netherlands. However, little is known about the practice, and it remains controversial.

Grounding lines are a key indicator of ice-sheet instability, because changes in their position reflect imbalance with the surround-ing ocean and affect the flow of inland ice. Although the grounding lines of several Antarctic glaciers have retreated rapidly due to ocean-driven melting, records are too scarce to assess the scale of the imbalance. Here, we combine satellite altimeter obser-vations of ice-elevation change and measurements of ice geometry to track grounding-line movement around the entire conti-nent, tripling the coverage of previous surveys.

The DREB (dehydration-responsive element binding)-type transcription factors are classified into six subgroups, named A-1 to A-6. The members of DREB A-1 and A-2 subgroups have been reported to be involved in response to various abiotic stresses. However, there were only a few genes belonging to A-3 to A-6 subgroups to be reported. In this study, we cloned a DREB A-4 subgroup gene from maize (Zea mays), ZmDREB4.1, and analyzed its characteristics and functions. ZmDREB4.1 was expressed in roots, stems, and leaves at very low levels. It was not induced by any biotic or abiotic treatment.

Aggregation of alpha synuclein has strong implications in Parkinson’s disease. The heterogeneity of folding/aggregation landscape and transient nature of the early intermediates result in difculty in developing a successful therapeutic intervention. Here we used fuorescence measurements at ensemble and single molecule resolution to study how the late and early events of alpha synuclein aggregation modulate each other.

Original Source

Climate change is driving global species redistribution with profound social and economic impacts. However, species movement is largely constrained by habitat availability and connectivity, of which the interaction effects with climate change remain largely unknown. Here we examine published data on 2798 elevational range shifts from 43 study sites to assess the confounding effect of land-use change on climate-driven species redistribution.

Original Source

Drought is an extreme and frequent event in the north-west region of Bangladesh and it adversely affects the livelihood of the farming community. Identifying the coping strategies that farmers use in the face of drought is crucial in order to understand how farmers minimize the effects of drought on their production, especially in the face of climatic changes that may impact the occurrence of extreme weather events. The purpose of this study was to assess farmers’ coping strategies for droughts by identifying which strategies are used and the influencing factors.

Aerosol Optical Thickness (AOT) is a measure of solar spectral extinction. Long term AOT data analysis gives a picture of air quality for that location. This type of analysis is useful in the study of impact of urbanization on local climate. Aerosols are one of the most important but poorly understood factors that influence global climate change (IPCC, 2001). This calls for a need to regularly monitor the global aerosol distributions and study how they are changing over time.