Public Transport in Pune

During Internet surfing I found link to this site http://www.gopetition.com/online/8517.html which is collecting signs from general public to file a petition against Pune Municipal Corporation to improve public transport system in Pune. I think every citizen in Pune should sign it.


Public Transport in Pune 716 Signatures
Category: Roads & Transport
Region: India
Description/History:May 5, 2006

Pune is amongst the most polluted cities in India. Due to growing wealth within the low/middle-income groups, the number of cars, two and three wheelers plying on the roads have increased substantially. Pune traffic has become increasingly unruly and dangerous.
Individuals could easily consider giving up on their 2 wheelers and cars, provided an efficient public transport was available. There may be a need to cut down on the number of rickshaws as well.

This petition is aimed at solving some of these difficulties.

Petition:

Pune needs an efficient and a safe rapid public transport system in place. We need not look too far for inspiration. Bombay can serve as an example.
We request Civic & State Transport Authorities to implement the following

1) Allow private public transport system within Pune.

2) Existing PMT buses should not only be increased in numbers but replaced with modern energy efficient vehicles.

3) Further all major parts of Pune should be linked with each other.

4) PMT should function more like a Corporate providing detailed information on bus frequencies, time-tables & ensuring bus-stops of high standards (but not occupying entire width of pavements).

5) To ensure a rapid transport system, create dedicated bus lanes on major roads.

6) Encourage use of Public Transport by introducing competitive fares (including season & annual passes).

7) Discourage use of personal vehicles (2 wheelers and cars) by introducing a road tax collected as a percentage of the amount of petrol used/bought. This way road tax cannot be evaded and will be proportional to amount of use of cars.

8) Restrict rickshaws to periphery of Pune. If there is fear of job losses, rickshaw drivers should be given an opportunity to re-train and become a part of expanding PMT or any private public transport enterprise.

Jai Hind, Jai Maharashtra

North Korea's Missile Ploy: No Good Options

To say that the Bush Administration is exasperated by North Korea's provocations is an understatement. After all, the only thing worse than watching a charter member of President Bush's "Axis of Evil" thumb its nose at the international community, is not having an effective means to respond. And despite all the tough talk emanating out of Washington, the U.S. has few good options for responding to the latest bit of saber-rattling from the hermit Stalinist regime in Pyongyang, this time involving an all-too-real saber: A Taepodong 2 long-range missile, capable of hitting Alaska and Japan, which North Korea appears to be shaping up to test-fire.

Such a test would end a moratorium on missile testing the North Korea adopted in 1998 to create confidence in six party talks over its nuclear program. But with those talks stalled since last November over widely differing interpretations between Washington and Pyongyang over what had been agreed, North Korea appears inclined to reclaim the spotlight from Iran by reminding the international community that left untended, it can cause plenty of trouble.

But if the North Koreans are engaged in political theater with missiles, the U.S. may have decided to respond in kind. U.S. officials reportedly acknowledged Tuesday that Washington's multi-billion-dollar missile defense system has been made operational in the past two weeks, despite the fact that that the system — whose record even in tests rigged in its favor has been so dismal that testing was eventually suspended — has yet to prove capable of actually doing its job. That gesture seemed to sum up the Administration's dilemma: Its policies to pressure North Korea to desist from bad behavior have simply not worked. And now North Korea is raising the stakes.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stressed that a missile test would be a provocation. "I can assure everyone that it would be taken with utmost seriousness," she warned, although she did not specify what consequence might result. The U.S. would consult with its allies on the next step, she said. Those other parties to the talks certainly share the U.S. alarm at the prospect of a North Korea test — Japan warned that if the missile fell on its territory, it would be regarded as an attack (although it later softened that position), while South Korea urged its neighbor not to "put a friend in danger" by firing a missile, and China called for calm. But it's not clear that any possible consequences would substantially alter North Korea's cost-benefit analysis.

Western economic sanctions mean comparatively little to an economy already largely isolated; and the two countries on which Pyongyang substantially depends, China and South Korea, have long made clear that they have no intention of putting a serious economic squeeze on Pyongyang, for fear that it would topple the regime and spread chaos across the Korean peninsula. Still, China values its ties with the U.S., even as that relationship becomes strained by geopolitical conflicts of interest, and it is therefore reportedly furious at North Korea's tactics. Quiet pressure from Beijing may be the best bet for restraining the North Koreans, but even that is far from a sure thing.

The most perceptive warning, however, may have come from Australia: "North Korea would be gravely mistaken if it thinks that a missile test would improve its bargaining position in the six-party talks," said foreign minister Alexander Downing. If brinkmanship is his game — and the pattern of previous North Korean tactics suggests that the missile threat may indeed be a negotiating ploy as much as anything else — North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il may also be aware that actually going ahead with a missile test (rather than simply dangling the threat of doing so) could weaken rather than strengthen his bargaining position. That's because North Korea has profited diplomatically from the view in Beijing and Seoul that the impasse in the six-party process is as much a result of the Bush Administration's hard line as of Pyongyang's recalcitrance.

A missile test could destroy South Korea's strategy of engagement with the North, and force China to distance itself from Pyongyang, dashing any hope of a breakthrough that would improve the regime's prospects of reviving its sclerotic economy. Kim Jong-il may, however, believe that a missile test will create a crisis that will, as it has repeatedly since 1994, force the great powers to deal with North Korea in ways that ultimately reward his brinkmanship. With the volatile fuel reportedly already in the rockets, it may be a matter of days before the answer is known.

Why Do Humans Have So Few Genes?

When leading biologists were unraveling the sequence of the human genome in the late 1990s, they ran a pool on the number of genes contained in the 3 billion base pairs that make up our DNA. Few bets came close. The conventional wisdom a decade or so ago was that we need about 100,000 genes to carry out the myriad cellular processes that keep us functioning. But it turns out that we have only about 25,000 genes--about the same number as a tiny flowering plant called Arabidopsis and barely more than the worm Caenorhabditis elegans.

That big surprise reinforced a growing realization among geneticists: Our genomes and those of other mammals are far more flexible and complicated than they once seemed. The old notion of one gene/one protein has gone by the board: It is now clear that many genes can make more than one protein. Regulatory proteins, RNA, noncoding bits of DNA, even chemical and structural alterations of the genome itself control how, where, and when genes are expressed. Figuring out how all these elements work together to choreograph gene expression is one of the central challenges facing biologists.

In the past few years, it has become clear that a phenomenon called alternative splicing is one reason human genomes can produce such complexity with so few genes. Human genes contain both coding DNA--exons--and noncoding DNA. In some genes, different combinations of exons can become active at different times, and each combination yields a different protein. Alternative splicing was long considered a rare hiccup during transcription, but researchers have concluded that it may occur in half--some say close to all--of our genes. That finding goes a long way toward explaining how so few genes can produce hundreds of thousands of different proteins. But how the transcription machinery decides which parts of a gene to read at any particular time is still largely a mystery.

The same could be said for the mechanisms that determine which genes or suites of genes are turned on or off at particular times and places. Researchers are discovering that each gene needs a supporting cast of hundreds to get its job done. They include proteins that shut down or activate a gene, for example by adding acetyl or methyl groups to the DNA. Other proteins, called transcription factors, interact with the genes more directly: They bind to landing sites situated near the gene under their control. As with alternative splicing, activation of different combinations of landing sites makes possible exquisite control of gene expression, but researchers have yet to figure out exactly how all these regulatory elements really work or how they fit in with alternative splicing.

In the past decade or so, researchers have also come to appreciate the key roles played by chromatin proteins and RNA in regulating gene expression. Chromatin proteins are essentially the packaging for DNA, holding chromosomes in well-defined spirals. By slightly changing shape, chromatin may expose different genes to the transcription machinery.

Genes also dance to the tune of RNA. Small RNA molecules, many less than 30 bases, now share the limelight with other gene regulators. Many researchers who once focused on messenger RNA and other relatively large RNA molecules have in the past 5 years turned their attention to these smaller cousins, including microRNA and small nuclear RNA. Surprisingly, RNAs in these various guises shut down and otherwise alter gene expression. They also are key to cell differentiation in developing organisms, but the mechanisms are not fully understood.

Researchers have made enormous strides in pinpointing these various mechanisms. By matching up genomes from organisms on different branches on the evolutionary tree, genomicists are locating regulatory regions and gaining insights into how mechanisms such as alternative splicing evolved. These studies, in turn, should shed light on how these regions work. Experiments in mice, such as the addition or deletion of regulatory regions and manipulating RNA, and computer models should also help. But the central question is likely to remain unsolved for a long time: How do all these features meld together to make us whole?

What Is the Biological Basis of Consciousness?

For centuries, debating the nature of consciousness was the exclusive purview of philosophers. But if the recent torrent of books on the topic is any indication, a shift has taken place: Scientists are getting into the game.

Has the nature of consciousness finally shifted from a philosophical question to a scientific one that can be solved by doing experiments? The answer, as with any related to this topic, depends on whom you ask. But scientific interest in this slippery, age-old question seems to be gathering momentum. So far, however, although theories abound, hard data are sparse.

The discourse on consciousness has been hugely influenced by René Descartes, the French philosopher who in the mid-17th century declared that body and mind are made of different stuff entirely. It must be so, Descartes concluded, because the body exists in both time and space, whereas the mind has no spatial dimension.

Recent scientifically oriented accounts of consciousness generally reject Descartes's solution; most prefer to treat body and mind as different aspects of the same thing. In this view, consciousness emerges from the properties and organization of neurons in the brain. But how? And how can scientists, with their devotion to objective observation and measurement, gain access to the inherently private and subjective realm of consciousness?

Some insights have come from examining neurological patients whose injuries have altered their consciousness. Damage to certain evolutionarily ancient structures in the brainstem robs people of consciousness entirely, leaving them in a coma or a persistent vegetative state. Although these regions may be a master switch for consciousness, they are unlikely to be its sole source. Different aspects of consciousness are probably generated in different brain regions. Damage to visual areas of the cerebral cortex, for example, can produce strange deficits limited to visual awareness. One extensively studied patient, known as D.F., is unable to identify shapes or determine the orientation of a thin slot in a vertical disk. Yet when asked to pick up a card and slide it through the slot, she does so easily. At some level, D.F. must know the orientation of the slot to be able to do this, but she seems not to know she knows.

Cleverly designed experiments can produce similar dissociations of unconscious and conscious knowledge in people without neurological damage. And researchers hope that scanning the brains of subjects engaged in such tasks will reveal clues about the neural activity required for conscious awareness. Work with monkeys also may elucidate some aspects of consciousness, particularly visual awareness. One experimental approach is to present a monkey with an optical illusion that creates a "bistable percept," looking like one thing one moment and another the next. (The orientation-flipping Necker cube is a well-known example.) Monkeys can be trained to indicate which version they perceive. At the same time, researchers hunt for neurons that track the monkey's perception, in hopes that these neurons will lead them to the neural systems involved in conscious visual awareness and ultimately to an explanation of how a particular pattern of photons hitting the retina produces the experience of seeing, say, a rose.

Experiments under way at present generally address only pieces of the consciousness puzzle, and very few directly address the most enigmatic aspect of the conscious human mind: the sense of self. Yet the experimental work has begun, and if the results don't provide a blinding insight into how consciousness arises from tangles of neurons, they should at least refine the next round of questions.

Ultimately, scientists would like to understand not just the biological basis of consciousness but also why it exists. What selection pressure led to its development, and how many of our fellow creatures share it? Some researchers suspect that consciousness is not unique to humans, but of course much depends on how the term is defined. Biological markers for consciousness might help settle the matter and shed light on how consciousness develops early in life. Such markers could also inform medical decisions about loved ones who are in an unresponsive state.

Until fairly recently, tackling the subject of consciousness was a dubious career move for any scientist without tenure (and perhaps a Nobel Prize already in the bag). Fortunately, more young researchers are now joining the fray. The unanswered questions should keep them--and the printing presses--busy for many years to come.

What Is the Universe Made Of?

Every once in a while, cosmologists are dragged, kicking and screaming, into a universe much more unsettling than they had any reason to expect. In the 1500s and 1600s, Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton showed that Earth is just one of many planets orbiting one of many stars, destroying the comfortable Medieval notion of a closed and tiny cosmos. In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble showed that our universe is constantly expanding and evolving, a finding that eventually shattered the idea that the universe is unchanging and eternal. And in the past few decades, cosmologists have discovered that the ordinary matter that makes up stars and galaxies and people is less than 5% of everything there is. Grappling with this new understanding of the cosmos, scientists face one overriding question: What is the universe made of?

This question arises from years of progressively stranger observations. In the 1960s, astronomers discovered that galaxies spun around too fast for the collective pull of the stars' gravity to keep them from flying apart. Something unseen appears to be keeping the stars from flinging themselves away from the center: unilluminated matter that exerts extra gravitational force. This is dark matter.

Over the years, scientists have spotted some of this dark matter in space; they have seen ghostly clouds of gas with x-ray telescopes, watched the twinkle of distant stars as invisible clumps of matter pass in front of them, and measured the distortion of space and time caused by invisible mass in galaxies. And thanks to observations of the abundances of elements in primordial gas clouds, physicists have concluded that only 10% of ordinary matter is visible to telescopes.

But even multiplying all the visible "ordinary" matter by 10 doesn't come close to accounting for how the universe is structured. When astronomers look up in the heavens with powerful telescopes, they see a lumpy cosmos. Galaxies don't dot the skies uniformly; they cluster together in thin tendrils and filaments that twine among vast voids. Just as there isn't enough visible matter to keep galaxies spinning at the right speed, there isn't enough ordinary matter to account for this lumpiness. Cosmologists now conclude that the gravitational forces exerted by another form of dark matter, made of an as-yet-undiscovered type of particle, must be sculpting these vast cosmic structures. They estimate that this exotic dark matter makes up about 25% of the stuff in the universe--five times as much as ordinary matter.

But even this mysterious entity pales by comparison to another mystery: dark energy. In the late 1990s, scientists examining distant supernovae discovered that the universe is expanding faster and faster, instead of slowing down as the laws of physics would imply. Is there some sort of antigravity force blowing the universe up?

All signs point to yes. Independent measurements of a variety of phenomena--cosmic background radiation, element abundances, galaxy clustering, gravitational lensing, gas cloud properties--all converge on a consistent, but bizarre, picture of the cosmos. Ordinary matter and exotic, unknown particles together make up only about 30% of the stuff in the universe; the rest is this mysterious anti-gravity force known as dark energy.

This means that figuring out what the universe is made of will require answers to three increasingly difficult sets of questions. What is ordinary dark matter made of, and where does it reside? Astrophysical observations, such as those that measure the bending of light by massive objects in space, are already yielding the answer. What is exotic dark matter? Scientists have some ideas, and with luck, a dark-matter trap buried deep underground or a high-energy atom smasher will discover a new type of particle within the next decade. And finally, what is dark energy? This question, which wouldn't even have been asked a decade ago, seems to transcend known physics more than any other phenomenon yet observed. Ever-better measurements of supernovae and cosmic background radiation as well as planned observations of gravitational lensing will yield information about dark energy's "equation of state"--essentially a measure of how squishy the substance is. But at the moment, the nature of dark energy is arguably the murkiest question in physics--and the one that, when answered, may shed the most light.