INSA: new initiatives and concerns

The Indian National Science Academy (INSA), New Delhi which is currently in its Platinum Jubilee year, has maintained its eminence and dignity all these years. The Fellowship of INSA is highly cherished. The Academy enjoys considerable prestige. This prestige needs to be converted into influence. INSA is in the process of setting up a Science Policy Study Cell. The Academy needs to strengthen its role as a think-tank in the service of the nation on science-related issues. INSA is also in the process of establishing an archive. We can understand the present and plan for the future only in the context of the past. Thirdly, we would like to establish an electronic hub of science information at INSA. We do not wish to solely hold large quantities of information. But we need to have links with all major depositories of science- related information in the country. This is in consonance with the general philosophy of an Academy. The Academy is not a major implementer or executor of policies and programmes. It is a catalyst and a beacon that guides.

Long Wavelength Peristaltic Transport of Non-Newton Fluids

Solutions are obtained for the stream function and the pressure field for the flow of non-Newtonian fluids in a tube by long peristaltic waves of arbitrary shape. The axial velocity profiles and stress distributions on the wall are discussed for particular waves of some practical interest. The effect of non- Newtonian character of the fluid is examined.

MHD Flow with Heat and Mass Transfer Due to a Point Sink

The magnetofluid dynamic steady incompressible laminar boundary layer flow for a point sink with an applied magnetic field and mass transfer has been studied. The two-point boundary-value problem governed by self-similar equations has been solved numerically. It is observed that the magnetic field increases the skin friction, but reduces the heat transfer and mass flux diffusion. However, the skin friction, heat transfer and mass flux diffusion increase due to suction and the effect of injection is just opposite. Prandtl and Schmidt numbers affect the temperature and concentration, respectively.

Unsteady free Convection MHD Boundary Layer Flow Near a Three-Dimensional Stagnation Point

The unsteady free convection boundary layer hydromagnectic flow near a stagnation point of a three-dimensional body with applied magnetic field and time-dependent wall temperature has been studied. Both semi-semilar and self-similar cases have been considered. The equations governing the above flow have been solved numerically using an implicit finite-difference scheme due to Keller. The magnetic field is found to reduce both the heat transfer and skin friction. The effect of the variation of the wall temperature with time and of mass transfer is found to be more pronounced on the heat transfer than on the skin friction. In self-similar case, for decelerating flow, there is temperature overshoot in the presence of fmagnetic field, but in semi-similar case overshoot occurs even without magnetic field due to the unsteadiness

Unsteady Self-similar Stagnation Point Boundary Layers for Micropolar Fluids

The self-similar solution of the unsteady laminar incompressible two-dimensional and axisymmetric stagnation point boundary layers for micropolar fluids governing the flow and heat transfer problem has been obtained when the free stream velocity and the square of the mass transfer vary inversely as a linear function of time. The nonlinear ordinary differential equations governing the flow have been solved numerically using a quasilinear finite-Difference scheme. The results indicate that the coupling parameter, mass transfer and unsteadiness in the free stream velocity strongly affect the skin friction, microrotation gradient and heat transfer whereas the effect of microrotation parameter is strong only on the microrotation gradient. The heat transfer is strongly dependent on the prandtl number whereas the skin friction gradient are unaffected by it.

Membrane modifying linear polypeptide antibiotics

Peptides Possessing antibiotic activity isolated from microbial sources have been the subject of intensive structural and biological investigation over the past two decades. Perhaps, the discovery and widespread use of penicillin, a molecule biosynthetically derived from a tripeptide precursor, as a strong antibacterial agent, has provided the necessary impetus for the detailed study of microbial peptides. While many of these peptides have not been used clinically, They show unique metal binding properties and often possess the ability to modify the electrical properties or ion permeabilities of artificial lipid membranes. Hence, these peptides have been used extensively to study transmembrane ion transport processes in model and natural systems like mitochondria, chloroplasts and plasma membranes.

On the PAPR of cosets of linear codes

Employing an error control code is one of the techniques to reduce the Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) in a Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing system, a well known class of such codes being the cosets of Reed-Muller codes. In this paper, we consider the class of such coset-codes of arbitrary linear codes and present a method of doubling the size of such a code without increasing the PAPR, by combining two such binary coset-codes. We identify the conditions under which we can employ this doubling more than once with no marginal increase in the PAPR value. Given a PAPR and length, our method has enabled to get the best coset-code (in terms of the size). Also, we show that the PAPR information of the coset-codes of the extended codes is obtainable from the PAPR of the corresponding coset-codes of the parent code. We have also shown a special type of lengthening is useful in PAPR studies.

THE BERGMAN KERNEL FUNCTION

In this note, we point out that a large family of n x n matrix valued kernel functions defined on the unit disc D subset of C, which were constructed recently in [9], behave like the familiar Bergman kernel function on ID in several different ways. We show that a number of questions involving the multiplication operator on the corresponding Hilbert space of holomorphic functions on D can be answered using this likeness.