Human-powered water vehicle aims to break world speed record
Toronto: An ambitious group of students in Canada is developing a new human-powered water vehicle which it hopes will break a 23-year-old world speed record. The students will attempt to reach a blistering pace of 37 km/h with the vehicle called Leviathan, breaking the current speed record of 34 km/h set by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Cambridge, in 1991. The mechanical engineering students at the University of Sherbrooke, in Canada, have been working for the past two years to develop the speedy craft, which will make its world record attempt next year, ‘LiveScience’ reported.
“The vehicle itself has to be perfected for both aerodynamic and hydrodynamic performance,” said Christian Blais, a student at the University of Sherbrooke. The team comprises of 13 students, each of whom is responsible for one of the vehicle’s 13 subsystems. The vehicle is powered completely by human pedalling, which drives a propeller in the water.
The twin-hulled craft resembles a catamaran, but underneath each hull is a submerged wing, or hydrofoil, the report said. The front hydrofoils are controlled by an onboard computer to keep the boat stable, a feature that previous human-powered watercraft lacked, Blais said. The pilot can also change the angle of the propeller blades to optimise them for different speeds, he said. (PTI)
4,000 take part in Mount Fuji eruption drill
Tokyo: Nearly 4,000 people took part today in a mass evacuation drill to test responses to a possible eruption of Japan’s highest peak Mount Fuji, weeks after a nearby volcano blew its top and killed at least 56.
The 3,776-metre (12,389-foot) Fuji last erupted in 1707 but geologists have included it as one of 47 volcanoes in the Pacific Rim country believed to be at risk of eruption in the coming century. Some 3,900 residents in 26 cities, towns and villages in three prefectures around the volcano were taking part in the drill, said a disaster management official for the Shizuoka prefectural government. Fuji is just 100 kilometres (63 miles) west of Tokyo. In the city of Gotemba, about 800 people used their own cars to evacuate along designated routes because public transportation is scarce there, the official, Hayato Mochizuki, told.
Elderly people in need of care were moved by bus. Firefighters, police and troops searched for people who could not evacuate in time, he said. Eriko Yamatani, the state minister in charge of disaster management, and the governors of the three prefectures took part in a video conference to oversee the operation. On September 27 Mount Ontake, some 120 kilometres from Fuji, erupted without warning — killing 56 people and leaving at least seven others missing in Japan’s deadliest eruption for almost 90 years. Mochizuki said the Fuji exercise had been planned for three years. (AFP)
Rome mayor defies law to register 16 gay marriages
Rome: Rome’s left-wing mayor Ignazio Marino on Sunday registered 16 gay marriages carried out abroad in defiance of Italian law, which does not recognise same-sex unions.
The ceremony, involving gay men and women, took place in Rome’s town hall on the Capitoline Hill as Catholic bishops from all over the world met at the Vatican on the other side of the river Tiber for a synod on the family, which is discussing whether the Church should open up to homosexuals.
The couples, accompanied by their families and sometimes their children, walked up one after the other to have their unions registered by Marino. The prefecture of Rome later annulled the registrations, which are illegal under Italian law, which does not recognise gay marriage. Italy’s centre-right Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said on Facebook that “we must remember that this is not possible under Italian law”.
The diocese of Rome criticised the mayor for his “ideological choice” and “the institutional affront” of registering the couples when he knew it was against the law, in its Roma Sette weekly review. A heated debate is raging within the Church over the place of gays, who have long been condemned by the hierarchy. Even the most progressive of the 200 bishops meeting at the synod in Rome, however, have not raised the possibility of gay marriage. Catholic doctrine dictates that marriage is between a man and a woman. (AFP)
Putin tiger may spend winter in China
Beijing: A Siberian tiger that reportedly roamed into China after being set free by Russian President Vladimir Putin may spend the winter in China.
The big cat “Kuzya,” tagged with a tracking device, is moving southward, further away from Russia, said Eugene Simonov, coordinator with Rivers without Boundaries Coalition, a multinational non-governmental organisation. “We have to prepare ourselves that Kuzya will spend winter in China. The Russian experts have called for local Chinese not to feed the tiger with any poultry, which is vital to keep its wild survival ability,” state-run Xinhua news agency quoted Simonov, the Russian coordinator of the joint program to find the beast.
Kuzya was one of three Siberian tigers released by Putin in May. Jiang Guangshu, the executive deputy chief of the felid research center under the state forestry administration, said the Russian side had updated the new findings with the center. “The tiger received special training before being released. It has been kept away from human beings. The food it needs, such as wild boars and rabbits, can all be found in the area where it is staying,” said Jiang.
Hair, feces and tracks possibly left by the tiger were discovered in areas where the animal is suspected to have travelled in the vast forest area of the Lesser Hinggan Mountain in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang. Siberian tiger experts have arrived in the area to facilitate tracking, locating and protecting the tiger, he said. Fewer than 500 Siberian tigers remain in the wild, mainly in eastern Russia, northeast China and northern parts of the Korean Peninsula. China puts its own number of wild Siberian tigers between 18 and 22, mostly living in the border areas. (PTI)
British Police to launch anti-dowry drive
London: British police will be trained in tackling dowry-related violence after it was found that the issue was still rife among some of the migrant communities in Britain. A probe conducted by The Independent found that hundreds of women a year, including those of Indian-origin are being ‘burnt, scalped, imprisoned or otherwise abused in their homes over financial disputes with their in-laws’. Senior police officers told the newspaper that they would be launching an initial review into the issue based on the evidence provided.
“It is very hard for us to put strategies in place if no one tells us it is going on. Following this information, there will be a real hard line with this. We may need to create some sort of new system,” Commander Mak Chishty, Association of Chief Police Officers’ national lead for forced marriage, honour-based violence and female genital mutilation said. “Working with dowry violence would now be incorporated into the training of 140,000 police officers in this country,” he said. However, the UK Crown Prosecution Service does not provide guidelines for dealing with dowry violence and the topic is not mentioned in its ‘Violence Against Women and Girls’ strategies. Jasvinder Sanghera, founder of the Karma Nirvana charity, blamed the “absence of records” on dowry violence and a “complete absence of recognition” that the problem exists as the reasons behind the crime. (PTI)
“We need police to start recording this and then we need professional bodies like the British Medical Association to start talking about this very openly because it’s a factor in depression and suicide,” she said. Dowry, a centuries-old custom is prevalent in parts of South Asia, Africa, Middle East and Eastern Europe. “Once we start recording this, I suspect it will be a little bit like when we first started recording FGM (female genital mutilation) – it will be very under-reported and it will be very difficult to reach the women who are being abused,” officer Chisty said. Women’s groups are also urging the police to reopen unexplained cases of missing women from ethnic-minority backgrounds, saying that awareness of possible dowry links could throw up new leads. PTI AK SRY NSA SRY 10181743