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A quarter of all new public restrooms in Indian cities will soon have high-end features such as luxurious bath cubicles, touchless flushing, breast-feeding rooms, and automatic sanitary napkin incinerators. These will be indicated as “aspirational toilets” on Google Maps.
A directive has been sent to all State governments to ensure that henceforth 25% of public toilet seats added in any city or urban unit are ‘aspirational toilets.
The high-end public conveniences may also have attached libraries, cafes, and shopping complexes to help raise funds for their maintenance and upkeep.
The focus areas to construct these luxury restrooms will be tourist and religious destinations, as well as iconic cities. In these cities, places with a high footfall — markets, railway stations, inter-State bus depots and National Highways — will be given preference.
The idea is to ensure the presence of such conveniences in places where people are likely to spend over three hours at a stretch.
Guidelines issued to the States say that the bathrooms will need to be stain- and graffiti-free, have low height toilets and basins for children, a well-maintained patch of greenery around them, hand-dryers and paper napkins readily available, along with vending machines for sanitary napkins. An SMS-based feedback mechanism for users must also be put in place.
The Ministry has decided to engage start-ups that can build such toilets across the country. A team of experts from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur has been entrusted with the task of screening and evaluating the proposals of these start-ups.
So far, 75 companies have been shortlisted, out of which 30 proposals have been finalised. The pilot project will be rolled out by October 2024.
One of the business models being explored for the maintenance of these toilets is attaching them with other public services, such as restaurants, shopping malls, libraries, cinema halls, or even medicine shops, to make them self-sustaining.
News
Chinese dual use facilities in Myanmar and Sri Lanka raise security concerns in India (Page no. 7)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
The construction of a military facility on Coco Islands in Myanmar and a proposed remote satellite receiving ground station system in Sri Lanka, both coming up with Chinese help, have raised concern in India of possible surveillance across the region.
Recent satellite images show the construction of a military facility on Coco Islands, located very close to the Andaman and Nicobar island chain.
In the second case, China has proposed setting up a remote satellite receiving ground station system through a collaborative effort between the Aerospace Information Research Institute, under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the University of Ruhuna in southern Sri Lanka.
Given its critical location, it can be used to spy on Indian assets and intercept sensitive information and also across the region, sources in the security establishment said.
One of these sources, on condition of anonymity, cited intelligence inputs on what is believed to be a complete military base being built entirely by the Chinese on the Coco Islands.
There are obvious concerns. There was a radome [dome-shaped structure to protect radars] spotted on the island recently through satellite images, adding that the island is being connected to the southern landmass using a new bridge that is 175 m in length and approximately 8 m wide.
The facility can always be used by the Chinese military when required, the source stated.
Science & Tech
Omicron variants evolve strategies to evade T cell immunity (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 2, Health)
Much like many other viruses that have developed strategies to evade T cell-mediated clearance by humans, SARS-CoV-2 virus too has the ability to evade the CD8 T cells.
While neutralising antibodies are responsible for preventing infection, CD8 T cells play a huge role in reducing the viral load and clearing the infection by detecting and killing infected cells. The CD8 T cells cannot prevent infection.
Astudy recently published in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(PNAS) found that the SARS-CoV-2 virus encodes multiple viral factors that modulate major histocompatibility complex class I (MHC I) expression in the host cells.
The MHC I plays an important role inalerting the immune system to virally infected cells. The MHC I molecules are expressed on the surface of all infected cells.
When a virus infects a cell, one of the ways in which the immune system responds is by attaching short sequences of proteins from the virus (antigen) to MHC I molecules, thus presenting the antigen on the outside of the cell. Killer T-cells look for antigens inside MHC I and if they find any that match the specific thing they are programmed to kill, they go ahead and kill it.”One of the common tricks that viruses use to avoid killing is to inhibit MHC I expression and presentation.
SARS-CoV-2 is no exception. The SARS-CoV-2 virus has evolved multiple strategies to inhibit MHC I expression, which is not seen in the case of the influenza virus. The suppression of MHC I is specifically seen in the infected cells and varies between different viral strains.
Our data showed that MHC I suppression is mediated by a number of viral gene products and affects only the infected cells. Such a mechanism will not lead to generalised immunodeficiency but reflects a specific survival mechanism for SARS-CoV-2,” Dr. AkikoIwasaki, Yale University immunologist and the corresponding author of the paper.
Immune evasion from CD8 T cells could allow the virus in infected cells to survive better in the host. The virus could establish a safe niche for prolonged replication.To eliminate such persistent reservoirs, we need to employ antivirals or antibody therapy.
Magnetoresistance: one more thing graphene does differently (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Tech)
Researchers in the U.K., led by Nobel laureate Andre Geim, have discovered another property ofgraphene— a single-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms bonded in a honeycomb pattern — that further distinguishes this ‘wonder’ material.
Dr. Geim and his colleagues found that graphene displays an anomalous giant magnetoresistance (GMR) at room temperature.
GMR is the result of the electrical resistance of a conductor being affected by magnetic fields in adjacent materials. It is used in hard disk drives and magnetoresistive RAM in computers, biosensors, automotive sensors, and medical imagers.
GMR-based devices are particularly used to sense magnetic fields. The new study has found that a graphene-based device, unlike conventional counterparts, would not need to be cooled to a very low temperature to sense these fields.
A conductor is sandwiched between two ferromagnetic materials (metals attracted to magnets, such as iron). When the materials are magnetised in the same direction, the electrical resistance in the conductor is low. When the directions are opposite to each other, the resistance increases. This is known as GMR.
The magnetoresistance observed in the graphene-based device was “almost 100-times higher than that observed in other known semimetals in this magnetic field range”, Alexey Berdyugin, assistant professor of physics at the National University of Singapore and the co-author of the paper.
The effect is due to the way electrons in the conductor scatter off electrons in the ferromagnets, depending on the orientation of the latter’s spin which is affected by the direction of the magnetic field.
Conventional GMR devices are cooled to low temperatures to suppress the kinetic energy of their constituent particles, keeping them from deflecting the electrons moving past them. In graphene, the researchers found this suppression unnecessary.
Antiviral-resistant H1N1 spreads from wild ducks to chickens (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 2, Health)
When the influenza burden is high during certain years, the amount of antiviral oseltamivir used will be high. Much of it enters the water system and will end up driving antiviral resistance in avian viruses.
Previous work has demonstrated that influenza virus can develop resistance to oseltamivir carboxylate (OC) when the virus infects wild ducks that are exposed to environmental-like OC concentrations suggesting that environmental resistance is a concern.
Avian influenza strain H1N1 with the OC resistance mutation (NA-H274Y) has been found to retain resistance even when the environment did not contain oseltamivir carboxylate, suggesting maintained fitness of the virus.
If wild birds, wild ducks in particular, are the first to be infected by influenza virus brought in by migratory birds, domestic poultry act as an important amplifying host, and a source of influenza virus evolution. The virus that has evolved can then spread from poultry birds to humans.
A study recently published in the Journal of General Virology has demonstrated that oseltamivir-resistant strain can transmit from wild ducks to chickens and then spread between chickens, while retaining the resistance mutation in an experimental setting mimicking conditions suitable for natural transmission.
Our results demonstrate that regardless of the oseltamivir-resistance mutation, infection was detected in experimentally-infected chickens and chickens in contact with infected mallards. However, none of the virus strains established sustained transmission in chickens.
According to the authors, this may be due to poor species adaptation of the virus. “We demonstrated limited interspecies transmission, with no difference between wild-type and resistant virus.
However, neither oseltamivir-resistant strain nor the wild type was able to establish a sustained transmission in chickens in the two different experiments.
Business
Upcoming FTAs will boost India’s exports: MoS for Commerce (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
The upcoming free trade agreements (FTA) with countries would boost exports from India including those from the chemicals sector.
The chemicals industry is benefiting from the two FTAs that we have concluded. Now, we are proceeding with our negotiations with the U.K., the European Union, and Canada.
By year-end, we will be able to finalise FTAs with a few more countries and they are moving in the right direction because our intention is to create more balanced FTAs, which could be favourable to both the countries and provide as much global access as possible to our exporters. So, we are quite hopeful that this year would be good for us in terms of some more FTAs being signed.
The Minister said that out of total exports of $770 billion achieved for FY23, the contribution of the chemicals industry is $30 billion.
The growth in chemicals export has been quite steady. It is the fastest-growing sector. In 2020-2021 it [exports] was $23 billion and for next year, it was $27 billion. Chemicals will make a huge contribution to overall exports.