The New Anthem of our Country

Times of India had embarked a unique talent search which has the potential to make a huge difference to India. They began a hunt to identify new leaders for a new India, men and women with the vision and ability to empower India with the kind of political leadership that is so conspicuous by its absence.

The Lead India campaign stemmed from the belief that even as India takes giant strides towards fulfilling its undoubted potential, it is doing so despite, not because of, its political leadership. ‘‘Good people don’t want to join politics’’ is an oft-heard lament. And yet, good governance is the cornerstone if India is to overcome the many hurdles that threaten to slow its journey to developed nation status.

And so, the company decided to provide a platform to the good men and women out there who refuse to be daunted by the system, and struggle against massive odds to make life better for their fellow Indians.

A couple of very meaningful advertisement for this initiative…

Drive for Safety

• In India there is a road accident every 100 seconds.

• One person dies on the road every 7 minutes.

• Over 1000 people are injured every 24 hours!

No wonder then that India accounts for the second largest number of road accidents in the world. The video below is a part of the Castrol Company's "Drive for Safety" campaign. A wonderful and hard hitting advertisement. Guess every individual with a mobile phone and who drives a car must watch this!

First Lungless Frog

Scientists have first discovered a species of lungless frog, dubbed the Bornean flat-headed frog in a remote clear, cold-water stream in the Kalimantan region on island of Borneo in Indonesia. The frog, named Barbourula kalimantanensis, gets all its oxygen through its skin.

Previously known from only two specimens, two new populations of the aquatic frog were found by the team during a recent expedition to Indonesian Borneo. (See Map Below)


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Serendipity
Nobody knew about the lunglessness before the researchers accidentally discovered it doing routine dissections, says study lead author David Bickford, a biologist at the National University of Singapore. The discovery of lunglessness in a secretive Bornean frog supports the idea that lungs are a malleable trait in amphibians, which represent the evolutionary sister group to all other tetrapods, according to the researchers. They speculate that the loss of lungs might be an adaptation to a combination of factors: a higher oxygen environment, the species’s presumed low metabolic rate, severe flattening of their bodies that increases the surface area of their skin, and selection for negative buoyancy—meaning that the frogs would rather sink to the bottom of the freezing waters it inhabits than float.

Lot More to Be Discovered in Nature
What struck the researcher the most is that there are still major firsts (e.g., first lungless frog!) to be found out in the field. He suggests that you have to do is go a little ways beyond what people have done before, to scream—voila!

Lunglessness
Of all tetrapods (animals with four limbs), lunglessness is only known to occur in amphibians. There are many lungless salamanders and a single species of caecilian, a limbless amphibian resembling an earthworm, known to science. Nevertheless, the complete loss of lungs is a particularly rare evolutionary event that has probably only occurred three times.

Under Threat
The researchers said that further studies of this remarkable frog may be hampered by the species’s rarity and endangerment. They therefore strongly encourage conservation of the frogs’ remaining habitats. This is a highly endangered frog—that we know practically nothing about—with an amazing ability to breathe entirely through its skin, whose future is being destroyed by illegal gold mining by people who are marginalized and have no other means of supporting themselves,” Bickford said. “There are no simple answers to this problem.”

Source
A report in the April 8th issue of Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press.