Greater Bangalore: Emerging Urban Heat Island

Bangalore is experiencing unprecedented urbanisation and sprawl in recent times due to concentrated developmental activities with impetus on industrialisation for the economic development of the region. This concentrated growth has resulted in the increase in population and consequent pressure on infrastructure, natural resources and ultimately giving rise to a plethora of serious challenges such as climate change, enhanced green-house gases emissions, lack of appropriate infrastructure, traffic congestion, and lack of basic amenities (electricity, water, and sanitation) in many localities, etc. This study shows that there has been a growth of 632% in urban areas of Greater Bangalore across 37 years (1973 to 2009). Urban heat island phenomenon is evident from large number of localities with higher local temperatures. The study unravels the pattern of growth in Greater Bangalore and its implication on local climate (an increase of ~2 to 2.5 ºC during the last decade) and also on the natural resources (76% decline in vegetation cover and 79% decline in water bodies), necessitating appropriate strategies for the sustainable management.

Consumerist Predators"? Emerging lifestyles between McDonaldization and sustainability perspectives: the case of highly qualified employees (HQEs) in India

In industrializing countries new groups of consumers with remarkable purchasing power are emerging. Representing a ?new middle class? they are seen as a carrier and promoter of a so-called ?western way of life? beyond the OECD countries. They are presented as having a consumerist predator lifestyle which stands in conflict with the requirements for a sustainable future. Furthermore, they are imputed a profound lack of a sense of responsibility towards society. However, such a ?civil society spirit? is a core prerequisite for coping with the challenge of changing existing lifestyles to insure a more sustainable future....

Existing and emerging strategies for the synthesis of nanoscale heterostructures

Development of new multifunctional nanostructures relies on the ability to make new materials at the nanoscale with control over size, shape and composition. While this control is extremely important to tune several properties, an alternative strategy is to create active interfaces between two or more nanostructures to form nanoscale heterostructures. In these heterostructures, the interfaces play a key role in stabilizing and enhancing the efficiency of the individual components for various applications. In this article, we discuss synthesis methods of different types of nanoscale heterostructures and the role of interfaces in various applications. We present the current state-of-the-art in designing heterostructures and possible upcoming synthetic strategies with their advantages and disadvantages. We present how such heterostructures are highly efficient for catalytic, photovoltaic and nanoelectronic applications drawing several examples from our own studies and from the literature.

Population, globalization and urbanization: Trends and underlying prosesses

Third World hinterlands provide most of the settings in which the quality of human life has improved the least over the decade since Our Common Future was published. This low quality of life promotes a desire for large number of offspring, fuelling population growth and an exodus to the urban centres of the Third World, Enhancing the quality of life of these people in ways compatible with the health of their environments is therefore the most significant of the challenges from the perspective of sustainable development. Human quality of life may be viewed in terms of access to goods, services and a satisfying social role. The ongoing processes of globalization are enhancing flows of goods worldwide, but these hardly reach the poor of Third World countrysides. But processes of globalization have also vastly improved everybody's access to Information, and there are excellent opportunities of putting this to good use to enhance the quality of life of the people of Third World countrysides through better access to education and health. More importantly, better access to information could promote a more satisfying social role through strengthening grass-roots involvement in development planning and management of natural resources. I illustrate these possibilities with the help of a series of concrete experiences form the south Indian state of Kerala. Such an effort does not call for large-scare material inputs, rather it calls for a culture of inform-and-share in place place of the prevalent culture of control-and-command. It calls for openness and transparency in transactions involving government agencies, NGOs, and national and transnational business enterprises. It calls for acceptance of accountability by such agencies.

Draft Genome Sequence of Staphylococcus aureus ST672, an Emerging Disease Clone from India

We report the draft genome sequence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) strain ST672, an emerging disease clone in India, from a septicemia patient. The genome size is about 2.82 Mb with 2,485 open reading frames (ORFs). The staphylococcal cassette chromosome mec (SCCmec) element (type V) and immune evasion cluster appear to be different from those of strain ST772 on preliminary examination.

Current trends in modeling hostpathogen interactions

The rapid emergence of infectious diseases calls for immediate attention to determine practical solutions for intervention strategies. To this end, it becomes necessary to obtain a holistic view of the complex hostpathogen interactome. Advances in omics and related technology have resulted in massive generation of data for the interacting systems at unprecedented levels of detail. Systems-level studies with the aid of mathematical tools contribute to a deeper understanding of biological systems, where intuitive reasoning alone does not suffice. In this review, we discuss different aspects of hostpathogen interactions (HPIs) and the available data resources and tools used to study them. We discuss in detail models of HPIs at various levels of abstraction, along with their applications and limitations. We also enlist a few case studies, which incorporate different modeling approaches, providing significant insights into disease. (c) 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Trends and Variability of AVHRR-Derived NPP in India

In this paper, we estimate the trends and variability in Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR)-derived terrestrial net primary productivity (NPP) over India for the period 1982-2006. We find an increasing trend of 3.9% per decade (r = 0.78, R-2 = 0.61) during the analysis period. A multivariate linear regression of NPP with temperature, precipitation, atmospheric CO2 concentration, soil water and surface solar radiation (r = 0.80, R-2 = 0.65) indicates that the increasing trend is partly driven by increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration and the consequent CO2 fertilization of the ecosystems. However, human interventions may have also played a key role in the NPP increase: non-forest NPP growth is largely driven by increases in irrigated area and fertilizer use, while forest NPP is influenced by plantation and forest conservation programs. A similar multivariate regression of interannual NPP anomalies with temperature, precipitation, soil water, solar radiation and CO2 anomalies suggests that the interannual variability in NPP is primarily driven by precipitation and temperature variability. Mean seasonal NPP is largest during post-monsoon and lowest during the pre-monsoon period, thereby indicating the importance of soil moisture for vegetation productivity.

Trends in aerosol optical depth over Indian region: Potential causes and impact indicators

The first regional synthesis of long-term (back to similar to 25 years at some stations) primary data (from direct measurement) on aerosol optical depth from the ARFINET (network of aerosol observatories established under the Aerosol Radiative Forcing over India (ARFI) project of Indian Space Research Organization over Indian subcontinent) have revealed a statistically significant increasing trend with a significant seasonal variability. Examining the current values of turbidity coefficients with those reported similar to 50 years ago reveals the phenomenal nature of the increase in aerosol loading. Seasonally, the rate of increase is consistently high during the dry months (December to March) over the entire region whereas the trends are rather inconsistent and weak during the premonsoon (April to May) and summer monsoon period (June to September). The trends in the spectral variation of aerosol optical depth (AOD) reveal the significance of anthropogenic activities on the increasing trend in AOD. Examining these with climate variables such as seasonal and regional rainfall, it is seen that the dry season depicts a decreasing trend in the total number of rainy days over the Indian region. The insignificant trend in AOD observed over the Indo-Gangetic Plain, a regional hot spot of aerosols, during the premonsoon and summer monsoon season is mainly attributed to the competing effects of dust transport and wet removal of aerosols by the monsoon rain. Contributions of different aerosol chemical species to the total dust, simulated using Goddard Chemistry Aerosol Radiation and Transport model over the ARFINET stations, showed an increasing trend for all the anthropogenic components and a decreasing trend for dust, consistent with the inference deduced from trend in Angstrom exponent.