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XI XII I
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TIMES

THE TIMES OF INDIA, PUNE

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2015

17

TRENDS

An earthquake-proof bed designed

SHORT CUTS
Reuters

iTOONS

SUNIL AGARWAL & AJIT NINAN

Fitted With Sensors To Detect Temblor, It Folds User Into A Steel Box
Raphye Alexius/Corbis

Doug Bolton

Russian inventor has designed a bed that can protect

one by folding them up in a
steel box during an earthquake.
On first glance the bed looks conventional, despite being quite
high. However, if an earthquake
hits, sensors in the bed detect the
movement and collapse the mattress down into the beds box-shaped metal body. After this, a lid
shuts over the top, protecting the
occupant from falling masonry or
even a building collapse.
Supplies of food, bottled water,
first aid and gas masks are kept at
the bottom of the structure to ensure the occupant survives until
help arrives.

A replica of the plesiosaur Tuarangisaurus

cabazai is displayed at a museum in Buenos Aires.
Plesiosaurs, marine reptiles that thrived in the
seas when dinosaurs ruled the land, swam much
like penguins by using their flippers to fly
underwater, scientists said on Thursday, resolving
a debate that began nearly two centuries ago.
Nessie, Scotlands mythical Loch Ness monster,
often is portrayed as looking like a plesiosaur

UN recognises human
right to sanitation

Supplies of food, bottled water, first

aid and gas masks are kept at the
bottom of the structure to ensure the
occupant survives until help arrives

The beds come in different models from a full king-size bed

down to a smaller double. On the
face of it, its a good idea. Earthqu-

Man plays saxophone

during 12-hr brain op

n a bid to combat open defecation, the UN has

adopted a landmark resolution recognising
the human right to sanitation as a distinct
human right along with the right to safe drinking water, a move hailed by experts. The right
to sanitation is an essential component of the
right to an adequate standard of living, inextricably linked to the highest attainable
standard of health, and integrally related to the
human right to water, said Waleed Sadi, chair
of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights. In India, the country with the
highest number of people practicing open
defecation, the problem is acute over 200,000
Indian children dieing of diseases such as
diarrhoea every year.

akes can be devastating, and are

almost impossible to predict so
if youre sleeping when one occurs, you may not be able to take
action until its too late. However,
there are a few problems there
is no clue what happens if the occupants leg is hanging over the side when the steel lid snaps down
over the top of the bed.
The bed has been created by
Dahir Semenov, a Russian inventor, who creates concept designs
for defence and security devices.
Some of Semenovs more bizarre concepts include a giant
monorail-hovercraft hybrid capable of transporting hundreds of
people at a time, and solar-powered, ground-based drones capable
of
camouflaging themselves

and destroying tanks.

One earthquake-proof bed
that works in a similar way was
created and tested in China in 2012.
It works by folding the base of the
bed up and over the sleeping occupants, creating a metal lid that provides protection. This one operates much slower than Semonovs
design, reducing the chances of a
limb being lost significantly.
And in May this year, a team of
Israeli designers created an ordinary school desk that is capable of
withstanding a crushing weight of
a metric ton. Its an interesting
concept that could potentially save lives, but after seeing the video,
its safe to say that most people would take their chances with the
earthquake. THE INDEPENDENT

I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU JEDI AND WIFE

Reuters

Charlie Atkin

arlos Aguilera, a 27-year-old saxophonist from Malaga, Spain, underwent

a 12-hour brain surgery while playing
a saxophone.
Brain surgery patients can sometimes
be left awake to provide inputs during the
operation to help prevent unnecessary damage. A patient under sedatives but not general anesthetic, such as Aguilera, can offer
responses during surgery to avoid removing too much or too little of the tumour.
Aguileras neurosurgeon, Guillermo
Ibanez, said, It was very important that he
played in the final stages of the brain tumour surgery, as we were very close to the part
of the brain that is the listening cortex, said Ibanez. Two months ago, I was laid out
on a stretcher and now I can say life is waiting for me as if I had been born again, Aguilera said. THE INDEPENDENT

Rare full moon to light up skies on X-mas:

A full moon will light up the skies this Christmas, a rare event which has not occurred since
1977 and will not happen again till 2034, according to Nasa. Decembers full moon, the last of
the year, is called the Full Cold Moon because it
occurs during the beginning of winter. Nasas
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission has been
investigating the lunar surface since 2009.

STAR UNION: A couple tie the knot

in a Star Wars-themed ceremony
outside a movie theatre in Hollywood.
The wedding guests too dressed as
characters from the movie franchise

IVG: Tech offers hope

to infertile couples
Washington: A researcher
in US is examining the possibility of using in vitro gametogenesis (IVG) for human
reproduction and its ethical
and practical implications.
IVG is the method, most
advanced in mice, by which
gametes are derived from
pluripotent stem cells (capable of giving rise to several
different cell types) or embryonic stem cells. Research
suggests that
whilst not yet
BUNDLE
advanced
enough on human cells, IVG
for reproduction may one
day be possible in humans.
Using a relational autonomy framework, professor
Sonia Suter is analysing the
benefits and harms of IVG,
which depend on the social,
scientific, and legal contexts
in which it is used.
Those who cannot conceive for physical reasons,
same-sex couples, postmenopausal women or premenarche girls, and groups of

more than two multiplex

parenting can go for IVG for
reproduction.
What distinguishes IVG
from the current assisted reproductive
technologies
(ART), like IVF, is that it would allow such couples to have biologically related children without using gamete
donors. For example, a gamete of the opposite sex could be derived from an individuals
cells. This in
OF JOY
combination
with a naturally derived gamete from other member of
the couple could be used to
produce an embryo.
IVG could play a role in
efforts to have a healthy or enhanced child by making prenatal selection much easier
and more robust, Suter said.
It could, for example, be used
to create many more embryos for preimplantation genetic diagnosis than we can today, vastly refining the ability to select embryos. PTI

Times of India, Pune, December 17, 2015 Pg.17

Curiosity finds silica deposits on Mars Human ancestors survived ice age

Washington: Nasas Mars

Curiosity rover has found
high concentrations of silica
a rock-forming chemical
commonly seen on Earth as
quartz which could help
scientists learn more about
the ancient wet environment
on the red planet.
Curiosity found much
higher concentrations of silica at some sites it has studied
in the past seven months. Silica makes up nine-tenths of
the composition of some of
the rocks.

Denis Scott/CORBIS

PUZZLING FIND

These high-silica compositions are a puzzle. You can boost the concentration of silica
either by leaching away other
ingredients while leaving the

silica behind, or by bringing in

silica from somewhere else,
said Albert Yen, a Curiosity team member.
Water that is acidic would
tend to carry other ingredients away and leave silica behind. Alkaline or neutral water could bring in dissolved
silica that would be deposited
from the solution.
The recent findings on
Mount Sharp have intriguing
threads linked to what an
earlier Nasa rover, Spirit, found halfway around Mars.

There, signs of sulfuric acidity were observed.

Some silica at one rock Curiosity drilled, called Buckskin, is in a mineral named tridymite, rare on Earth and never seen before on Mars. The
usual origin of tridymite on
Earth involves high temperatures in igneous or metamorphic rocks, but the finely layered sedimentary rocks examined by Curiosity have been interpreted as lakebed deposits.
It may be evidence for magmatic evolution on Mars. PTI

Beijing: An ancient species

of human thought to be long
extinct may have survived
until as recently as the end of
the last ice age, a 14,000 yearold mysterious thigh bone found in China suggests.
The bone was found
among the remains of Chinas Red Deer Cave people.
The findings result from a
study of the partial femur,
which had lain unstudied for
more than a quarter of a century in a museum in southeastern Yunnan, following its

National Geographic Society/Corbis

excavation in 1989.
The investigators found
the thigh bone matched those from species like Homo
habilis and early Homo erectus that lived more than 1.5
million years ago. Its young
age suggests that primitivelooking humans could have
survived very late in our evolution, but we need to be careful as it is just one bone, said
professor Ji Xueping.
The new find hints at the
possibility a pre-modern
species may have overlapped

REWRITING HISTORY

in time with modern humans on mainland East

Asia, said associate professor Darren Curnoe.
Like the primitive speci-

es Homo habilis, the Maludong thigh bone is very

small; the shaft is narrow,
with the outer layer of the
shaft (or cortex) very thin;
the walls of the shaft are reinforced (or buttressed) in
areas of high strain.
The environment and
climate of southwest China
resulting from the uplift of
the Tibetan Plateau may have
provided a refuge for human
diversity, perhaps with premodern groups surviving very late, Curnoe said. PTI