‘From space, Nepal looks like a white necklace’

Suvecha Pant

"Yuri Gagarin called us to space," said Neil Armstrong, the first man to set step on the moon. Armstrong was talking about Russian born Gagarin who in 1961 was the first cosmonaut to reach beyond the sky. This statement rightly summarises the fascination of humans to space and the dreams of reaching the stars. Vladimir Djanibekov is one of the lucky few who had travelled to space and that too five times.

To those who must be wondering how the earth must look like from space. Well, according to Djanibekov it’s simply ‘breathtaking’. "From space Nepal looks like a white necklace," he says. Djanibekov adds that of the few landmarks that can be viewed from space, the Himalayas are one of them. "The country is surrounded by brilliant white mountains."

For a man who has achieved so much in his lifetime, Djanibekov is actually quite simple. As he smokes a cigarette a sense of satisfaction can be seen in his face and he speaks about himself as follows: "most of my life I lived the planet ground, but all my life I dreamed of the sky, the peregrinations, the flights towards remote worlds".

To those young Nepalese who dream of becoming astronauts’ one day, Djanibekov has given some expert advice. He advises those young people to stick to some basic rules: education, maintain excellent physical fitness and lastly to dream. "But, the most important is to have the power to reach the dream," he says.

From early childhood Djanibekov dreamed of space. The stars and the universe fascinated him. "In 1957 the Sputnik spaceship was launched and it was then I knew I was to someday become an astronaut," he says. His inspirations can be traced to school, where his Physics teacher encouraged in following his dream to reach space. "My Physics teacher used to talk about the space and rockets," he recalls. After school he entered university in the Physics faculty. He then did his graduation working as a pilot trainer. He joined the crew of astronauts in 1970 and it was only after 8 years of gruelling training that he was able to set off to space. He trained at the Centre of Astronauts Training, Russia.

So, what does this man who has been to space five times have to say about Nepal? "It is a very beautiful country soaked in history," he replies. This is his first time in Nepal and he has enjoyed his stay. "Nepal has touched me," he says.

Of the five flights to space, his most memorable is abroad Salyut 7. A rescue crew, including Djanibekov, was launched to Salyut 7 on June 6, 1985. For the first time ever, a crew manually docked to a totally disabled space station. When Djanibekov entered the station, they found their future home with no lights, heat, power or radio equipment working. Large icicles hung from the life support system pipes, and all water aboard the station had frozen.

As the cosmonauts’ own limited supply of water and food was running out, an intense operation rehabilitated the facility. Djanibekov remembers using new tools to fix the space station. "It was a dangerous task," he recalls. "We had to often hang from the spaceship and work from outside." Despite the difficulties, Salyut 7 was in working order by the beginning of 1986 and he proved that he was a true cosmonaut.

Djanibekov, has been honoured twice with being the ‘Hero of the USSR’. He was born in Iskandar, an area of Tachkent, République of Ouzbékistan. He belongs to the team of the cosmonauts since 1970 and accomplished 5 cosmic flights between 1978 and 1985.

April night sky

DR DEEPAK RAJ PANT

The sky-map shows the sky as seen from Kathmandu at 10:00 P.M. tonight. Put the map over your head facing downwards so that the cardinal directions are correctly orientated. The centre of the map marks the zenith, the point directly overhead. The circular edges represent the horizons. Azimuth (Az) is the angular distance measured clockwise from north towards the eastward around the horizon. Altitude (Alt) is the angular distance above the horizon.

A casual perusal of the night sky exposes a diffuse band of milky color light that extends around the sky, passing through such constellations as Sagittarius, Cygnus, Cassiopeia, Perseus and Orion. The Milky Way galaxy which is our hometown in the universe is almost ghost-like with a pale band of light rising from the southwest horizon and passes almost overhead before it sinks to the eastern horizon.

The Milky Way is the part of the sky where stars are most crowded together. It can be seen all through the year. Look at any part of the Milky Way through a telescope. What to the naked eye looks like a faint whitish blur becomes a crowd of stars. It has a brilliant nucleus bulge containing at least 100 billion stars. Most stars are actually less luminous than the sun. There are 160 concentrated globular clusters and 18,000 galactic star clusters. Each clusters containing 1 to 10 millions stars.

The sun belongs to the Orion-Cynus spiral arm and takes 220 million years to complete one revolution around the galactic nucleus which is at distances 33,000 light-years from us. Since the Earth was born, it has made 25 such trips already. A massive back hole (a space-time gravity funnel from which nothing can emerge and anything that crosses its boundary gets trapped, even light cannot escape) is believed to be lurking at center of the Milky Way.

Above your head, locate the constellation Leo looking more like a sphinx containing the brightest star Regulus and the second brightest star Denebola. There is an interesting group of galaxies M66 and M65 near the limb of Leo while galaxies M95, M96 and M105 are between Regulus and Denebola. These messier objects at distance 40 million light-years away are about same size of the Milky Way. The constellation Virgo is on the southeastern sky with the bright star Spica. The Virgo cluster includes both the galaxy M100 and a massive back hole that is hiding at centre of the galaxy M87.

The star Aldebaran and the moon both positioned on the constellation Taurus are setting at the west. The star Vega is rising from the northeast. The Big Dipper is above the Little Dipper. The circumpolar stars Dubhe and Kochab are high in the north sky. They never set but move in a circular path around the Pole star. Some part of the Big Dipper never sets but swings close to the horizon and then rises higher. The motion of the Big Dipper is counter-clockwise on a circle that is centered near the Pole star.

During the month of April, the sun passes from Pisces to Aries. Today the moon (Rises: 8:09am, Sets: 10:11pm, Illumination: 19.9 percentages) is 4.34 days old and has the phase Waxing Crescent. Tomorrow the sun rises: 5:33am, sets: 6:09pm and the astronomical twilight time begins: 4:11am, ends: 7:31pm.

Tea as an antidote

Vikram Basyal

Tea - an ancient natural beverage consumed in different ways the world over. Traditional and commercial tea is a plant product obtained by processing tender shoots obtained from the plants of Camellia Sinensis or tea plant. The use of tea plants for medicinal value has been documented to as early as 5000 years ago. Mainly in China, the plant water extract was used as a stimulator/energiser and also for the treatment of fever and minor ailments. As time progressed the plant become more popular among kings and aristocrats till the 17th century. Tea drinking remains a symbol of aristocracy.

The quality of tea is basically determined by the plant variety, growing soil and also the agro-climatic interaction. The absolute content of chemicals/biochemicals will determine the strength of the brews, mouth feel, and olfactory characters. There are three types of teas namely: The Green, Oolong/Semi fermented and the black/fully fermented teas. Each type is manufactured by altering the processing conditions.

The three dimensions of the quality i.e. style/physical, infusion feeling to tongue and eyes and the most important olfactory or aroma are considerably brought to prominence by art of manufacture. The shoots are very rich sources of polyphenols or antioxidants, derivatives of flavanoids, vitamin C and to some extent fluoride. Tea polyphenols have been shown to have antibacterial activity which could prevent some of the bacteria mediated disease spread. Even oxidized products of polyphenols namely the aflavins have been observed to have anti-oxidant and bactericidal activities. These polyphenols in both black and green teas also check certain types of cancer.

Amino acids, pure alkaloids (caffeine, theophyllin and theobramine) play an important role in aroma and some of the pharmacological effects of tea. It is generally observed that aromatic teas are invariable less strong and the heavy liquoring teas have less flavour. Hence consumer preference will also determine the concept of quality.

Since ancient time, tea has been found to possess several medicinal properties like antipyretic, antimicrobial, anti inflamatory and anti-oxidant effects. Besides this, green tea has been reported to inhibit tumor formation in experimental and epidemiological studies. Currently about 80 percent of the world population consumes black tea which contains a variety of polyphenolic ingredients including the aflavins, thearubigins and epigallo catechin-3-gallate (EGCG) in addition to some amount of caffeine and proteins. EGCG, the major component of both black and green tea, has been reported to scavenge free radicals generated by some well known mutagen and carcinogens of environmental origin like benzopyrene.

Epidemiological studies indicate that tea has a significant preventive effect on coronary heart disease mortality amongst cigarette smokers. It is well known that cigarette smoke is hazardous to health and we have observed that one of the most prominent hazardous effects of cigarette smoke is oxidative damage of proteins. It is demonstrated that black tea and its components prevent cigarette smoke induced oxidative damage. Black tea, the most widely used beverage, may protect the smoker from cigarette smoke-induced oxidative damage and associated degenerative diseases. Since tea is still the most popular non-alcoholic beverage, efforts are going on all over the world to investigate the usefulness of the tea against environmentally induced diseases, which could be used as future medicine.

The tea trade, which focused mainly on highly flavoured less strong black teas produced up to 90 percent of world produce till 1950’s. However, it gradually switched over to strong liquoring highly fermented CTC (extensively cut) teas to almost 95 percent by the end of 2000. During the past 20 years convenience products like dip tea bags, ready to drink beverages and instant tea have become very popular. Especially teas like differently flavours/scented teas have also attracted many segments of consuming countries. Many herbal preparations which may not even contain any camellia sinensis are also being sold under the banner of tea. Keeping in view of the hazards of agro chemicals resilient and their harmful effects latest trend in tea consumption is for organically grown teas. Hence, the quality preference of tea in the years to come will be on organically grown teas.

Software or professional skills

Sudan Jha

If we talk about the present scenario of hi-tech, al most everything has an influence of Information Technology (IT). So, how can education be left out? Realising this, most of the schools and colleges have introduced several courses relating IT or Computers. These academic institutions offer IT courses as part of syllabus, as introductory course or as an elective. But are the courses offered appropriate or compatible with the present trends? Are the students taking such courses as per their interests? Can all the students after undertaking these courses start a dynamic career?

These are some of the questions that are arising and therefore it has become necessary to know the time value of such courses and their scope in the present context of hi – tech. It seems that the computer education has become a fad among students and professionals alike. But there are many things that should be considered before deciding on which course to take.

One of the basic courses available in the IT market is the Windows package that constitutes of courses like MS-Office, Adobe-Photoshop, PageMaker and Power Point. One can find many institutions that offer such courses with rather a high fee. But a major point to be noted here is that you don’t have to take intensive training to get the knowledge of these courses. You can start each of those programs or the packages on your own by using Help files or getting simple guidance from anybody who knows it. It is seen that some of the training institutions, for the commercial benefits, offer such package like free Internet browsing, Web Page Designing, etc to make the course more attractive.

Even though most of the schools have adopted computer education in their syllabus, these courses don’t provide any concrete vision to the students as to where such type of courses will lead them. Due to inappropriate designing of the course and texts, the courses seem to be out of track. Likewise the students are not given the options (as per their field of interest) as there are a large number of courses - from designing fields to the graphic fields. Many schools and colleges in the valley have started to use computerised systems (like accounting software, library handling systems, record keeping software) but the students haven’t been introduced to the software structure or the functioning of such systems. Developing the software programs such as library programs, billing systems for their own institutions should be exercised as a final project or as an assignment that can help in building their respective computer skills professionally.

Prospective IT students are easily confused by the variety of courses on offer. For example, courses like C, C++, Visual Basic, Visual C+ +, Oracle, Java and C#, are the computer programming languages that are used in the implementation of software. If your interest is in the programming arena, then you can start with these courses. Some of these courses are also included in the syllabus of the engineering stream. On the other hand, if you want to make your career in the core IT business, you can start courses like GIS (Geographical Information System), GPS (Global Positioning system). Nowadays, computer networking has become a hot option to start a career. Various educational institutes have also started courses related with networking. If you are working in an office and are interested in various accounting software, then software like Tally will prove very useful.

As an example, we all know that Kathmandu Metropolitan is implementing GIS based numbering system. In fact, it is a program that deals with the graphical interpretation and that too with a database entity. Many firms and organisations in Nepal are working on this area. Thus, it can be said that GIS can be a good course to start with. On the other hand, NTC is working heavily on networking especially CSMA/CDMA and mobile networking. The course of Cisco certified Network Administrator (CCNA) can also be completed in Kathmandu.

Besides all these courses, there are many others that you can start. But the most basic thing is your interest and the importance of the course in the context of Nepal. Only then can the ultimate goal of IT education can be achieved.

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