Assessment of Tsunami Preparedness in East Coast of India through Mock drill conducted on 26 September, 2015

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami resulted in catastrophic losses of life and property and demonstrated how destructive the tsunamis can be. In India, the tsunami took away nearly 16,000 lives of the people living in the coastal areas and caused lot of damage to the property. The reason for such a great loss to lives and property is due to lack of awareness and preparedness to tsunamis. Keeping this in view and to avoid further future losses, the Government of India has established the Indian Tsunami Early Warning System at INCOIS, Hyderabad under the Ministry of Earth Sciences. While a tsunami cannot be prevented, its impact can be mitigated through community and emergency preparedness, timely warnings, effective response, and public education. The Tsunami drills evaluates the ability of warning centre and disaster offices to respond to a tsunami. The drills not only emphasize the testing of communications from warning centre to its stakeholders, but also provide an opportunity for testing national/state/local chains of command and decision-making, including the alerting and evacuation of people from selected coastal communitie

The admissible tsunamigenic source region of 24 September 2013 land-based earthquake application of backward ray tracing technique

A minor tsunami of about 50 cm was generated along the coast of Qurayat near Makran subduction zone in the Arabian Sea due to the 24 September 2013 Pakistan earthquake of magnitude 7.6 Mw(mB),although its source was ~200 km far inland of the Makran trench. The real time sea level observation network in the Arabian Sea recorded minor tsunami arrivals. In an attempt to explain the mechanism of this unusual tsunami, we use backward ray tracing technique to map the admissible region of tsunamigenic source. Basically, in this technique the ray equations are integrated starting from the specific locations of tsunami observations, in all possible directions. The known travel time of the initial waves to the respective tide gauges and tsunami buoys is used in this method. Backward wave front is constructed by joining all endpoints of the rays from each of the locations. The region where the envelope of all backward wave fronts converges is considered as the source of the tsunami, which is ~470 km from the earthquake epicentre with the location at 24.8 N and 61.5E. The admissible region identified is an undersea section between Chabahar and Gwadar, where a mud island had appeared subsequent to this earthquake. Convergence of the tsunami source zone and location of the mud island suggest that the sudden uplift must have caused the tsunam

Carcinoid tumour of appendix in a child: A rare case at an uncommon site

Carcinoid tumours of the appendix are uncommon incidentally detected tumours during histopathological examination following appendicectomy for acute appendicitis. Even though considered rare in children, they are the most frequently encountered tumours of the gastrointestinal tract. To  our  knowledge, carcinoid tumour of appendix in childhood has not yet been reported from Indian Subcontinent. The clinical presentation is similar to acute appendicitis and the signs and symptoms of carcinoid  syndrome have not been reported in children. The prognosis of carcinoid tumour of appendix is excellent in children as the tumour is generally small in size and less  aggressive with no metastasis. Simple  appendicectomy is curative in most of the patients and long term follow up is debatable. We present here a case of carcinoid tumour of the body of appendix, which is an uncommon location in a 6-year-old child.Key words: Body of appendix, carcinoid, Indian subcontinen

Sensing Shape Recovery Using Conductivity Noise in Thin Films of NiTi Shape Memory Alloys

Low frequency fluctuations in the electrical resistivity, or noise, have been used as a sensitive tool to probe into the temperature driven martensite transition in dc magnetron sputtered thin films of nickel titanium shape-memory alloys. Even in the equilibrium or static case, the noise magnitude was more than nine orders of magnitude larger than conventional metallic thin films and had a characteristic dependence on temperature. We observe that the noise while the temperature is being ramped is far larger as compared to the equilibrium noise indicating the sensitivity of electrical resistivity to the nucleation and propagation of domains during the shape recovery. Further, the higher order statistics suggests the existence of long range correlations during the transition. This new characterization is based on the kinetics of disorder in the system and separate from existing techniques and can be integrated to many device applications of shape memory alloys for in-situ shape recovery sensing