Traditional use of medicinal plants by the Jaintia tribes in North Cachar Hills district of Assam, northeast India

The study of ethnobotany relating to any tribe is in itself a very intricate or convoluted process. This paper documents the traditional knowledge of medicinal plants that are in use by the indigenous Jaintia tribes residing in few isolated pockets of northeast India. The present study was done through structured questionnaires in consultations with the tribal practitioners and has resulted in the documentation of 39 medicinal plant species belonging to 27 families and 35 genera. For curing diverse form of ailments, the use of aboveground plant parts was higher (76.59%) than the underground plant parts (23.41%). Of the aboveground plant parts, leaf was used in the majority of cases (23 species), followed by fruit (4). Different underground plant forms such as root, tuber, rhizome, bulb and pseudo-bulb were also found to be in use by the Jaintia tribe as a medicine. Altogether, 30 types of ailments have been reported to be cured by using these 39 medicinal plant species. The study thus underlines the potentials of the ethnobotanical research and the need for the documentation of traditional ecological knowledge pertaining to the medicinal plant utilization for the greater benefit of mankind

Machining aspects of a high carbon Fe3Al alloy

Iron aluminide alloys containing both ferrous as well as non-ferrous (aluminum) components form unique materials from machining theory and practice point of view. While the cutting tool materials specifically required for their machining are not available, the mechanism of machining of such materials containing ferrous and non-ferrous components has not been adequately investigated. This paper deals with fundamental aspects of chip formation and tool-life in machining of an iron aluminide, Fe3Al alloy. Microstructural analysis of chips shows that the interaction of chip and tool in the secondary deformation zone, dependent upon the cutting speed mainly determines the mechanism of chip formation. Results of tool-life testing indicate that thermal softening of tool point combined with abrasion is the predominant tool failure mechanism.© Elsevie

Measurement of spatial and temporal behavior of H-alpha emission from Aditya tokamak using a diagnostic based on a photomultiplier tube array

A photo multiplier tube (PMT) array based spectroscopic diagnostic with fast time response of 10 mu s and spatial resolution similar to 3 cm has been developed and installed on Aditya tokamak to study the spatial and temporal behavior of H-alpha emissions from typical discharges. Collimated light has been collected from the plasma along 16 lines of sight passing through entire plasma poloidal cross section of Aditya and detected by two 8 channels PMT arrays after selecting H-alpha emission using interference filter. The studies are carried out during plasma formation phase of Aditya by changing vertical field and its delay with respect to loop voltage. It is observed that plasma initiated in the high field side in typical discharges of Aditya. The plasma formation position is matched with null field location estimated through simulation. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC