Deep waters

India's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), in the waters around its territories, covers almost two-thirds of the country's land area. Although various maritime nations had drawn up bilateral or multilateral treaties about how they would share the resources along their coast, all of those were scrapped when the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) was concluded in 1982. 

It was probably the adoption of UNCLOS which prompted the Government of India to think about having a dedicated organization to figure out how to reap the benefits of the natural resources available within its EEZ. Marine engineering only scratches the surface of the oceans, and hence in 1993 was born the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT), based in Chennai, with its facilities at Pallikaranai. The NIOT carries out programmes for observation of the ocean as well as for the deployment of vessels to carry out deep-sea surveys in the EEZ. 

Since its founding, the NIOT has surveyed over 13,500 sqkm of the EEZ. The whole extent of India's EEZ is about 2,300,000 sqkm (If you think that's a lot, consider Japan's: over 4,479,000 sqkm, or New Zealand's, at about 4,300,000 sqkm). With so much of available area left to cover, the NIOT certainly has its work cut out over the next century or so!

Another blue board

White-on-blue boards held their own for a long time, through generations. Almost every business had similar boards, with the differences being only in the font of the letters. And then they suddenly disappeared from the scene; so now, every blue board with white lettering seems to be something of an antique.

This one is not all that old, however. The Madras Kidney Trust was founded in 1990 by Prof. M.S. Amaresan, with the aim of providing affordable medical care for renal conditions. With such an aim, the Trust will certainly need to economize in all areas. However, I don't think it extends to this board. There is a larger and more modern sign above this, with more up-to-date information, including the city's name as well as a phone number that is at least 8-digits.

I can only imagine there is some nostalgic - or superstitious - attachment to this board for it to be retained for so long. From being a ubiquitous signage, it is nice to see this being unique enough to catch the eye these days!

Model birds

Everyone knows that the CGI of dinosaur movements in the Jurassic Park movies were based on bird movements. Although I do not recall the movie credits ever mentioning what kind of birds were used to provide the model for dino-motion, these here are likely candidates. 

Not that this is a park of any kind. Rather, it is the research station of the TANUVAS - Tamil Nadu Veterinary and Animal Sciences University - at Kattupakkam. Not that I understand too much of it, but this research programme has been doing well; essentially the idea is to understand how the birds adapt to local conditions, so that commercial ostrich farming can be viable. That takes a couple of generations. With well over 60% of the ostrich eggs not hatching, it will take a while before you can get to see these take the place of chicken on the menu.

In the meantime, they continue to behave like, well, ostriches. Just because you think they bob their heads about like a velociraptor, you can't blame them for being copy-cats!

Empress?

That was the first thought on seeing this beauty at the Kattupakkam Livestock Research Station  of the TANUVAS. Lord Emsworth's favourite person in the world was his pig; the Empress of Blandings, supposedly a Berkshire pig. Now, Berkshire pigs are black, but I had always thought of the Empress as a pink pig - thanks to the illustrator's influence. Also, Emsworth's magical manse was set in Shropshire and this pig in the picture traces its ancestry to Yorkshire, rather than to the former county.

Kattupakkam LRS has had a fair amount of success in being able to produce a domestic strain of the original Large White Yorkshire. Over the past decade, the station has been offering seed-stock to pig farmers. Quite likely that this lady has several of her progeny all over the state!

Think you're fast?

From the air, it looks like a half-open switchblade knife, with a smaller appendage following the main blade. Located inside the Taramani campus of the University of Madras, the National Centre for Ultra-Fast Processes appears more like a bureaucratic office than the high-tech research facility it is.

The only one of its kind in the country, the NCUFP was set up to help researchers understand what happens in structures - physical, chemical or biological - during certain processes which take place in infinestimally small slices of time. The mind boggles so much at the mere description of such time-slices: nano-, pico- and femto-seconds, the last named being equal to 1 X 10^-15 of a second, that it is unable to imagine anything which can happen within that time. Apparently a lot of things do happen, enough to keep 4 full-time faculty members (and 2 Emeritus Professors in addition) busy guiding the 15 or so students doing their doctoral research in - well, some highly specialized areas. Typically, their research is around chemical processes, which usually take a few hundred femtoseconds to be completed.

The femtosecond, however is not the smallest unit of time that has been observed until now; that distinction goes to the attosecond, which is 1 X 10^-18 of a second (or a thousandth of a femtosecond). But even the attosecond is not the theoretical smallest unit of time. For the theoretical scientist, that would be Planck Time, which is the time taken for light in a vacuum to travel one unit of Planck Length (the smallest distance about which anything can be known, theoretically); the equivalent of 5.39 X 10^-44 seconds.

You certainly need more than just sharp eyes to spot the action at that speed - and here's Chennai using those eyes for all of us, all over the world!