First indigenous anti-submarine warfare ship ready

India's first indigenously-built anti submarine warfare corvette INS Kamorta is ready to be commissioned into the Indian Navy next month, defence officials said here today.

Built by the Garden Reach Shipbuilders & Engineers Ltd (GRSE), Kolkata, it will be the first warship armed with an indigenous rocket launcher for anti submarine warfare, they said.

The corvette is readying to sail out from GRSE's fitting-out jetty in Kolkata to join the Navy's eastern fleet at Vishakhapatnam in July, officials said.

The sophisticated front line warship with stealth features will also be the first warship armed with the new trainable chaff launcher — Kavach.

With an approximate displacement of 3400 tonnes, it can achieve a maximum speed of 25 knots. It is powered by four indigenously designed 3888 KW diesel engines at 1050 rpm and can cover nearly 3,500 nautical miles at 18 knots.

The overall length of the ship is 109 meters and is nearly 13 metres wide at its maximum bulge.

With about 90 per cent of the ship being indigenous, it is also capable of deploying a helicopter, adding considerable punch to the ship's anti-submarine capability.

Soft power & hard power

It is generally accepted that security, leadership, stability and influence in the 21st century rest primarily on military power or what is commonly described as hard-power capabilities. The contrasting argument is that political outcomes since the end of World War II have been primarily shaped by soft-power ingenuity that has consistently overcome military inferiority to achieve its desired political outcome. The United States was in complete control of land, air and sea throughout the Vietnam War, winning every battle and yet eventually losing the war, killing about 4 million Vietnamese on its way to a failed military campaign.

The US government now enjoys friendly and productive diplomatic and trade relations with a socialist Vietnam. This has made the wartime casualties and devastation even more tragic and pointless from every perspective. US military experts refused to learn from the outcome, treating the defeat as a geopolitical disease, the “Vietnam Syndrome” rather than as a reflection of a historical trend that is supportive of legitimate claims of self-determination despite military vulnerability of such nationalist movements. Although the Vietnam Syndrome was overcome in the wars with Iraq and Afghanistan, the USA did not achieve decisive victories in these conflicts.

Military power is of limited utility in conflict situations in the post-colonial world after the 1950s. It is the popular struggles that have shaped numerous outcomes in the last sixty years. These outcomes have trashed the perception that wars can be won only by the strong military side that then gets to shape the peace. The struggle for freedom was won by the militarily weaker side which prevailed in the end despite suffering disproportionate losses along its way to victory. What turned the historical tide against militarism was the rise of national and cultural self-consciousness most spectacularly first in India under the inspired leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. It is in India that coercive non-violent forms of soft power revealed their potency. Now that the world is talking in terms of non-violent geopolitics, the roadmap towards achieving that objective was shown by India. This was India’s unique gift to the world.

The anti-apartheid campaign extended the struggle against the racist regime of South Africa to a symbolic global battlefield where the weapons were coercive non-violent, reliance on boycott, divestment and sanctions. The collapse of apartheid was largely achieved by developments outside the sovereign territory of South Africa. The Palestinian struggle for legitimacy has been relying on an array of soft-power instruments including diplomacy and dialogue, a non-violent coercive boycott, divestment campaign and a variety of civil society initiatives. The communications revolution has helped the struggle. Even though grave uncertainty exists as to the future outcome, the Palestinian struggle seems to resemble the South African model. The Gandhian movement that led to India’s independence, the Mandela-led transformation of apartheid South Africa, people’s power in the Philippines and the soft revolutions of Eastern Europe in the late 1980s are striking illustrations of domestic transformations based on non-violent struggle. It is well documented that the British government could make progress in ending the violence in Northern Ireland only when it stopped thinking of the IRA as a terrorist organization and began treating it as a political actor with real grievances.

Against this background, geopolitics continues to be driven by a belief that the strategy of hard power will dominate the course of history. The US recourse to war in Iraq and Afghanistan has proved to be costly and misdirected. The wars have not served political ends. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the primacy of the United States has resulted inevitably in its geopolitical ascendancy. This position has been premised upon the confidence in the hard-power paradigm producing violent geopolitics in relation to critical unresolved conflicts. In the modern day world, the paradigm is untenable from both pragmatic and principled considerations. It relies on practices that involve massive killing of civilian population and colossal waste of resources. It is reported that even at a time of fiscal deficit, the US military budget is as much as the entire world put together and more than double the next ten leading states. In the USA, the military-industrial complex exerts tremendous influence on government policy.

The UN Charter had crafted a world order that contained most of the elements of non-violent geopolitics. That constitutional framing of world politics had placed an embargo on the use of force in international relations except in self-defence against a prior armed attack. Outlawing war as an instrument of international policy was the cardinal principle. If that was the legalistic vision of world order, it was politically possible to establish a world free of wars. That did not happen. The right of veto for the five permanent members of the Security Council affected decisions that were adverse to the vital interests of any one of these members and this de facto exemption from the commitment to non-violent geopolitics compromised the legal framing of the UN Charter. The United States and the former Soviet Union reaffirmed their reliance on their military capabilities, political alliances and deterrent doctrines to erect their security apparatus on the logic of countervailing hard power. The lack of political will to implement the Charter of non-violent geopolitics stands at the root of the primacy of hard power.

Non-violent geopolitics embedded in the UN Charter never involved a comprehensive embrace of non-violence as a precondition for political life. Within states, violent insurgent politics, various forms of civil strife and an internal war, unless it spilled over boundaries, were not in the UN domain. Thus the acceptance of internal sovereignty as legally absolute and sacrosanct meant that there would be no basis for effectively challenging incidents of genocide or severe crimes against humanity and other catastrophic circumstances confronting a society. In Syria, the Security Council began with a cautious approach not wanting to violate the UN Charter and aid a civil war. Russia and China vetoed several attempts at resolutions to bring an end to the conflict. Ultimately, the Council showed rare unity on Syria by passing Resolution 2118 on 7 September 2013. It required Syria to destroy its current stockpile of chemical weapons.

India and South Africa are struggling to create just societies. They have not been able to address the entire agenda of social and political issues and have left problems of exploitative class relations and social tensions unresolved. But their soft-power victories had overcome oppressive state and society relations without much reliance on violence.

The entire soft-power orientation has taken a giant leap forward as a result of the Arab Spring in which unarmed popular movements have challenged dictatorial and oppressive regimes with success in Egypt and Tunisia but elsewhere at least achieving promises of reforms. A united government for the West Bank and Gaza has been formed after years of negotiations. Although geographical unification still remains elusive, there is little doubt that the interim government is a significant step towards social and cultural integration of the Hamas and the PLO. Israel is not happy with the developments but the interim government has opened the window for durable peace in West Asia.
In the 21st century, the global political landscape has moved towards China, India, Brazil and Russia. Their rise is largely rooted in their economic development, and not associated at all with their military capabilities. A new world order on the basis of soft-power principles is gaining support, shifting the concept of non-violent geopolitics from the domain of utopianism to a genuine political project. Resistance from the hard-power domain will have to be overcome. If that happens, the world will live in peace.

Preliminary studies showed the new particle’s properties were consistent with those predicted for the Higgs boson by the Standard Model, but much more work was needed to confirm.

New evidence shows particle found in 2012 is the Higgs boson
There is a strong indication that the particle discovered in 2012 is the Higgs boson.

In a breakthrough, researchers at CERN have found the first evidence for the direct decay of the Higgs boson into fermions — a strong indication that the particle discovered in 2012 is the Higgs boson.

The findings confirm that the bosons decay to fermions — a group of particles that includes all leptons and quarks — as predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.

“This is an enormous breakthrough,” said Markus Klute, an assistant professor of physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

“Now we know that particles like electrons get their mass by coupling to the Higgs field, which is really exciting,” said Klute.

In July 2012 researchers from the ATLAS and Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiments at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), said they had observed a new particle in the mass region of 125 to 126 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).



Researchers wanted to clarify whether there was a single Higgs or many different Higgs particles, as predicted by various extensions of the Standard Model, Klute said.

“What we are trying to do is establish whether this particle is really consistent with the Higgs boson, the particle we predict in our Standard Model, and not one of many Higgs bosons, or an imposter that looks like it but has a different origin,” he said.

Previous analysis of the data produced by experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, in Switzerland, has shown that like the Higgs boson of the Standard Model, the new particles have no spin, and rapidly decay by splitting into pairs of photons, W bosons, or Z bosons. But it remained uncertain whether they could also decay to fermion pairs, Klute said.

Now the team from the CMS Collaboration has demonstrated that the bosons also decay to fermions in a way that is consistent with the Standard Model Higgs.

“We have now established the main characteristics of this new particle, in its coupling to fermions and to bosons, and its spin—parity structure; all of these things are consistent with the Standard Model,” Klute said.

To determine whether the particles could decay to fermions, the researchers fired protons at each other in a 6—metre—diameter solenoid and used specialised detectors to determine which particles were produced in the resulting collisions.

The researchers were hunting for particles called tau leptons, which have a mass of around 1.7 GeV, making them around 3,500 times heavier than their little sibling, the electron.

They were able to confirm the presence of decay to tau leptons with a confidence level of 3.8 standard deviations — a one in 10,000 chance that the signal they saw would have appeared if there were no Higgs particles.

The study was published in the journal Nature Physics.

environment :must read Pest sprays poisoning world food supply: study

The world’s most widely used insecticides have contaminated the environment across the planet so pervasively that global food production is at risk, according to a comprehensive scientific assessment of the chemicals’ impacts.

The researchers compare their impact with that reported in Silent Spring, the landmark 1956 book by Rachel Carson that revealed the decimation of birds and insects by the blanket use of DDT and other pesticides and led to the modern environmental movement.

Billions of dollars’ worth of the potent and long-lasting neurotoxins are sold every year but regulations have failed to prevent the poisoning of almost all habitats, the international team of scientists concluded in the most detailed study yet. As a result, they say, creatures essential to global food production — from bees to earthworms — are likely to be suffering grave harm and the chemicals must be phased out.

The new assessment analysed the risks associated with neonicotinoids, a class of insecticides on which farmers spend $2.6 billion a year. Neonicotinoids are applied routinely rather than in response to pest attacks but the scientists highlight the “striking” lack of evidence that this leads to increased crop yields.

“The evidence is very clear. We are witnessing a threat to the productivity of our natural and farmed environment equivalent to that posed by organophosphates or DDT,” said Jean-Marc Bonmatin, of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France, one of the 29 international researchers who conducted the four-year assessment. “Far from protecting food production the use of neonicotinoid insecticides is threatening the very infrastructure which enables it.” He said the chemicals imperilled food supplies by harming bees and other pollinators, which fertilise about three-quarters of the world’s crops, and the organisms that create the healthy soils which the world’s food requires in order to grow.

Professor Dave Goulson, at the University of Sussex, another member of the team, said: “It is astonishing we have learned so little. After Silent Spring revealed the unfortunate side-effects of those chemicals, there was a big backlash. But we seem to have gone back to exactly what we were doing in the 1950s.” The assessment, published today, cites the chemicals as a key factor in the decline of bees, alongside the loss of flower-rich habitats. The insecticides harm bees’ ability to navigate and learn, damage their immune systems and cut colony growth. In worms, which provide a critical role in aerating soil, exposure to the chemicals affects their ability to tunnel.

Dragonflies, which eat mosquitoes, and other creatures that live in water are also suffering, with some studies showing that ditchwater has become so contaminated it could be used directly as a lice-control pesticide.

The report warned that loss of insects may be linked to major declines in the birds that feed on them, though it also notes that eating just a few insecticide-treated seeds would kill birds directly.

“Overall, a compelling body of evidence has accumulated that clearly demonstrates that the wide-scale use of these persistent, water-soluble chemicals is having widespread, chronic impacts upon global biodiversity and is likely to be having major negative effects on ecosystem services such as pollination that are vital to food security,” the study concluded.

The report is being published as a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science and Pollution Research and was funded by a charitable foundation run by the ethical bank Triodos.

The EU, opposed by the British government and the National Farmers Union, has already imposed a temporary three-year moratorium on the use of some neonicotinoids on some crops. This month, Barack Obama ordered an urgent assessment of the impact of neonicotinoids on bees.

However, the Crop Protection Association, which represents pesticide manufacturers, criticised the report. Nick von Westenholz, chief executive of the CPA, said: “It is a selective review of existing studies which highlighted worst-case scenarios, largely produced under laboratory conditions. As such, the publication does not represent a robust assessment of the safety of systemic pesticides under realistic conditions of use.”

Unesco world heritage list tops 1,000

The Okavango Delta, a unique inland delta, which does not flow into a sea in Botswana became the 1,000th site to be inscribed on the UN cultural agency’s coveted list.
A vast wetland in Botswana, a prehistoric cave in France and an ancient land formation in the U.S. are among a host of new sites that have been added to the Unesco world heritage list over the last few days, pushing the total number to 1,007.

The Okavango Delta in Botswana became the 1,000th site to be inscribed on the UN cultural agency’s coveted list, which has been active since 1978 and commands strict rules for conservation from host nations. Botswana’s unique inland delta, which does not flow into a sea, was described by Unesco as “an exceptional example of the interaction between climatic, hydrological and biological processes… home to some of the world’s most endangered species of large mammal”. Its addition comes after almost a decade of advocacy from conservationists and scientific researchers. Speaking to the Guardian, Dr. Steve Boyes, scientific director of the Wild Bird Trust, who has worked as a wilderness guide in the Okavango, described the news as highly important, but “long overdue”.

“The region has Africa’s largest elephant population and is considered a sanctuary for white and black rhinoceros,” he says. “The listing will serve as a celebration of this unique wilderness as well as a call to action. All of this will be for nothing if Angola or Namibia decide to develop dams, weirs and mines along the Okavango river — so now begins the much bigger job of preserving the unprotected Angolan catchment. By 2025, we will know whether the Okavango Delta will survive into the distant future.”

The Grotte Chauvet in the Ardeche, France — home to the earliest known and best preserved figurative drawings in the world and described as an “exceptional testimony of prehistoric art” — was also added to the list. The cave, which remained cut off by a rockfall for 20,000 years until its discovery in 1994, contains over 1,000 images dating back to the Aurignacian period (30,000-32,000 years ago). While the closely guarded cave is off-limits to visitors, a replica is due to open in 2015.

“Its state of preservation and authenticity is exceptional as a result of its concealment over 23 millennia,” Unesco said.

Other inclusions, which consist of both cultural and natural sites, are the vineyard landscape of Piedmont in Italy, which has been a historic site for wine making since the fifth century B.C., a series of properties in the city of Bursa, Turkey, that demonstrate the social and economic functions of the Ottoman empire, and the Great Himalayan national park, a stunning yet fragile ecosystem that is home to many endangered species and will now receive close monitoring and observation of its biodiversity.

Burma made its entry on to the list for the first time when the Pyu ancient cities were awarded heritage status. The trio of brick, walled and moated cities of Halin, Beikthano and Sri Ksetra include excavated palace citadels and burial grounds as well as monumental brick Buddhist stupas.

Another notable addition is the prehistoric earthworks of Poverty Point in Louisiana, U.S.A. The complex of ancient mounds and ridges were created for residential and ceremonial purposes between 3,700 and 3,100 B.C. The site was praised by Unesco as: “A remarkable achievement in earthen construction in North America that was not surpassed for at least 2,000 years.” The decision, which was welcomed by the U.S. Department of State, comes a year after the U.S. lost its Unesco voting rights along with Israel. The U.S. has had far less influence over Unesco decisions since withdrawing its financial contributions to the organisation in 2011 after the Palestinian government was granted full membership.

Both Israel and Palestine had sites added to the list this week. The Palestinian village of Battir and its “cultural landscape” — currently under threat from the Israeli separation barrier — was added to the list on Friday, while the caves of Maresha and Bet Guvrin in Israel, an area of vast chalk caves in the Judean lowlands, gained world heritage status on Sunday.

Other sites awarded Unesco world heritage status this year include Qhapaq Nan, a vast Inca road system in Peru, and the fossil rich coastal cliff site of Stevns Kilt in Denmark, which offers “exceptional evidence of the impact of the Chicxulub meteorite that crashed into the planet about 65 millions years ago”. In order to be selected for the list, sites must be considered of outstanding universal value. Cultural sites are judged against a set of criteria such as whether it represents “a masterpiece of human creative genius” while the criteria for natural sites includes whether it “contains superlative natural phenomena or areas of exceptional natural beauty”.

More sites are expected to be added over the next two days as delegates at the world heritage committee work their way through the 40 sites up for consideration for special status during the organisation’s 38th session held in Doha, Qatar.

Inscription of the Great Himalayan National Park Conservation Area as a World Heritage Site

The World Heritage Committee has inscribed the Great Himalayan National Park Conservation Area (GHNPCA), India, on the World Heritage List on the basis of criterion (x) of UNESCO Guidelines. The Criterion X is “To contain the most important and significant natural habitats for in-situ conservation of biological diversity, including those containing threatened species of outstanding universal value from the point of view of science or conservation.”

The Great Himalayan National Park (GHNP) is located in the Kullu District of Himachal Pradesh, India. The concept of environmental conservation in the Kullu Valley is very ancient. The names of many places in this valley commemorate saints who came here to meditate in the great sanctuary of Himalayas. Some of these sanctuaries are still preserved as sacred groves of trees. The Great Himalayan National Park Conservation Area (GHNPCA) has GHNP (754.4 sq km), Sainj (90 sq km) and Tirthan (61 sq km) Wildlife Sanctuaries. The 905.40 sq km GHNPCA includes the upper mountain glacial and snow melt water source origins of the westerly flowing JiwaNal, Sainj and Tirthan Rivers and the north-westerly flowing Parvati River.

Situated at the confluence of Oriental and Palaearctic realms, GHNP provides a unique opportunity for the species from both biogeographic regions to thrive, disperse and evolve. GHNPCA is home to several Rare and Threatened species including the Western Tragopan, Chir Pheasant, Snow Leopard, Himalayan Musk Deer, Asiatic Black Bear, Himalayan Tahr, Blue Sheep and Serow. Some 25 Threatened IUCN Red-listed plant species are recorded from the park. The GHNP has more than 35 peaks of greater than 5000m and two greater than 6000m which taken together are arguably more exceptional than a few isolated higher peaks in the region. The boundaries of GHNP are also contiguous with the recently established (2010) Khirganga National Park (710 sq km), the Pin Valley National Park (675 sq km) in Trans-Himalaya, Rupi-Bhabha Wildlife Sanctuary (503 sq km) in Sutlej watershed and Kanawar Wildlife Sanctuary (61 sq km). Together these four protected areas (PAs) add 1,949 sq km to the area around GHNP and its buffer zone, making the total contiguous protected area associated with the nominated property approximately 2,854.4 sq km not including the Ecozone. GHNP inscription would serve to expedite integration of other PAs into a huge GHNP Conservation Area of ca. 2850 km2.

New material can bear 160,000 times its own weight

A new ultra-stiff, ultra-light material, build out of polymers, metals and ceramics, that can withstand 1,60,000 times its own weight has been developed.

Materials with these properties could someday be used to develop parts and components for aircraft, automobiles and space vehicles.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers developed the micro-architected meta-materials — artificial materials with properties not found in nature — that maintain a nearly constant stiffness per unit mass density, even at ultra-low density.

Most lightweight cellular materials have mechanical properties that degrade substantially with reduced density because their structural elements are more likely to bend under applied load.

The team’s meta-materials, however, exhibit ultra-stiff properties across more than three orders of magnitude in density.

“These lightweight materials can withstand a load of at least 1,60,000 times their own weight,” said LLNL Engineer Xiaoyu “Rayne” Zheng, lead author of the research.

“The key to this ultrahigh stiffness is that all the micro-structural elements in this material are designed to be over constrained and do not bend under applied load,” said Mr. Zheng.

The observed high stiffness is shown to be true with multiple constituent materials such as polymers, metals and ceramics, according to the researchers.

The additive micro-manufacturing process involves using a micro-mirror display chip to create high-fidelity 3D parts one layer at a time from photosensitive feedstock materials.

It allows the team to rapidly generate materials with complex 3D micro-scale geometries that are otherwise challenging or in some cases, impossible to fabricate.

“Now we can print a stiff and resilient material using a desktop machine. This allows us to rapidly make many sample pieces and see how they behave mechanically,” said MIT professor and key collaborator Nicholas Fang.

The team was able to build micro-lattices out of polymers, metals and ceramics.