Holy Ganga and the mighty Amazon

River Ganga is the largest and most sacred river of India. As compared to the mighty Amazon, it is very small but exerts great influence on the socio-cultural life and economy of lndia. Though the basin of River Ganga has been the cradle of human civilisation for several millennia, the rapid growth of human population, coupled with urbanisation, intensive agriculture and industrialization, has resulted in rapid deterioration of water quality and loss of aquatic biodiversity during past few decades. Some salient features of River Ganga are presented here and compared with those of River Amazon, in tribute to Professor Sioli who pioneered studies along the "Rio Amazonas"

Theoretical spectroscopic studies of the atomic transitions and lifetimes of low-lying states in Ti IV

The astrophysically important electric quadrupole (E2) and magnetic dipole (M1) transitions for the low-lying states of triply ionized titanium (Ti IV) are calculated very accurately using a state-of-art all-order many-body theory called Coupled Cluster (CC) theory in the relativistic frame-work. Different many-body correlations of the CC theory has been estimated by studying the core and valence electron excitations to the unoccupied states. The calculated excitation energies of different states are in very good agreement with the measurements. Also we compare our calculated electric dipole (E1) transition amplitudes of few transitions with recent many-body calculations by different groups. We have also carried out the calculations for the lifetimes of the low-lying states of Ti IV. A long lifetime is found for the first excited 3d$^{2}D_{5/2}$ state, which suggested that Ti IV may be one of the useful candidates for many important studies. Most of the results reported here are not available in the literature, to the best of our knowledge.Comment: 15 pages submitted to J. Phys.

Prevelence and causes of visual impairment and blindness in older adults in an area of India with a high cataract surgical rate.

BACKGROUND: The cataract surgical rate (CSR) in Gujarat, India is reported to be above 10,000 per million population. This study was conducted to investigate the prevalence and causes of vision impairment/blindness among older adults in a high CSR area. METHODS: Geographically defined cluster sampling was used in randomly selecting persons >or= 50 years of age in Navsari district. Subjects in 35 study clusters were enumerated and invited for measurement of presenting and best-corrected visual acuity and an ocular examination. The principal cause was identified for eyes with presenting visual acuity < 20/32. RESULTS: A total of 5158 eligible persons were enumerated and 4738 (91.9%) examined. Prevalence of presenting visual impairment < 20/63 to 20/200 in the better eye was 29.3% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 27.5-31.2) and 13.5% (95% CI: 12.0-14.9) with best correction. The prevalence of presenting bilateral blindness (< 20/200) was 6.9% (95% CI: 5.7-8.1), and 3.1% (95% CI: 2.5-3.7) with best correction. Presenting and best-corrected blindness were both associated with older age and illiteracy; gender and rural/urban residence were not significant. Cataract in one or both eyes was the main cause of bilateral blindness (82.6%), followed by retinal disorders (8.9%). Cataract (50.3%) and refractive error (35.4%) were the main causes in eyes with vision acuity < 20/63 to 20/200, and refractive error (86.6%) in eyes with acuity < 20/32 to 20/63. CONCLUSIONS: Visual impairment and blindness is a significant problem among the elderly in Gujarat. Despite a reportedly high CSR, cataract remains the predominant cause of blindness

Kodaikanal Digitized White-light Data Archive (1921-2011): Analysis of various solar cycle features

Long-term sunspot observations are key to understand and predict the solar activities and its effects on the space weather.Consistent observations which are crucial for long-term variations studies,are generally not available due to upgradation/modifications of observatories over the course of time. We present the data for a period of 90 years acquired from persistent observation at the Kodaikanal observatory in India. We use an advanced semi-automated algorithm to detect the sunspots form each calibrated white-light image. Area, longitude and latitude of each of the detected sunspots are derived. Implementation of a semi-automated method is very necessary in such studies as it minimizes the human bias in the detection procedure. Daily, monthly and yearly sunspot area variations obtained from the Kodaikanal, compared well with the Greenwich sunspot area data. We find an exponentially decaying distribution for the individual sunspot area for each of the solar cycles. Analyzing the histograms of the latitudinal distribution of the detected sunspots, we find Gaussian distributions, in both the hemispheres, with the centers at $\sim$15$^{\circ}$ latitude. The height of the Gaussian distributions are different for the two hemispheres for a particular cycle. Using our data, we show clear presence of Waldmeier effect which correlates the rise time with the cycle amplitude. Using the wavelet analysis, we explored different periodicities of different time scales present in the sunspot area times series.Comment: Accepted for Publication in A&

Weakly commensurable arithmetic groups, lengths of closed geodesics and isospectral locally symmetric spaces

We introduce the notion of weak commensurabilty of arithmetic subgroups and relate it to the length equivalence and isospectrality of locally symmetric spaces. We prove many strong consequences of weak commensurabilty and derive from these many interesting results about isolength and isospectral locally symmetric spaces.Comment: 62 page