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- Arvind's Newsletter
1.Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries has maintained its highest ranking among Indian corporates in the latest Fortune Global 500 list, jumping 16 places to rank at number 88.
As many as eight Indian companies feature in this year's Fortune Global 500 ranking. State-owned Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) jumped 48 places to rank at number 94.
Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) slipped nine places to rank at 107. Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (number 158), Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd (number 233), and State Bank of India (number 235) were the other state-owned firms on the list.
Tata Motors rose 33 places to rank at number 337 and Rajesh Exports jumped 84 spots to number 353.
2.As reported earlier in this week the Project Tiger has been doing well; but unfortunately the Project Cheetah has facing serious challenges as as the 9th Cheetah under the project dies and foreign experts express serious concerns on how the project is being managed.
The Indian Express reported that South African and Namibian experts, all members of the national cheetah project steering committee, under which 20 cheetahs have been translocated to India beginning last September, have written to the Supreme Court expressing their anguish over being kept in the dark and have raised “serious concerns” over the project’s management.
Meanwhile India Today reported the the ninth death since March at the Kuno National Park.
3.Researchers have discovered a mechanism that forces cancer cells to self-destruct, hijacking their ability to replicate uncontrollably and turning it against themselves.
The research team from Stanford University and gene therapy company Shenandoah Therapeutics published a paper last week in the journal Nature, describing how cancer cells can be rewired to "activate cell death," not unlike flipping a switch.
While we're still a long way from developing a drug for humans that takes advantage of this gene hack — assuming it's actually possible in a practical way — scientists are nonetheless intrigued by the prospect.
"It’s very cool," Jason Gestwicki, professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study, told the New York Times. "It turns something the cancer cell needs to stay alive into something that kills it, like changing your vitamin into a poison."
4.Ukraine’s latest weapons in its war with Russia: 3D-printed bombs. They are cheap—and surprisingly effective
Hand grenades are designed to be thrown, so they are light. But when they aredropped from drones, this can be a drawback. With a typical weight of just 300 grams, grenades are short on “killing power”, says a man nicknamed “Lyosha”, who is an amateur weapons-maker based in Kyiv. After one goes off, he says, targeted Russian soldiers “often just keep running”.
Three months ago Lyosha and a group of friends, working in their homes, designed an alternative: an 800-gram anti-personnel bomb called the “Zaychyk”, or “Rabbit”.
The group uses 3d printing to produce the bomb’s casing, before sending it to be filled with C4, an explosive, and pieces of steel shrapnel. In tests, Lyosha says, this shrapnel cuts into wooden planks “like butter”.Necessity is the mother of invention, and the Zaychyk is but one example of the sorts of lethal innovation that have sprung up in Ukraine in the 17 months since Russia’s invasion. Stocks of many factory-built munitions have shrunk as the fighting has worn on. But raw explosives remain plentiful. That has helped create an amateur arms industry devoted to supplying soldiers at the front with improvised weapons to use against Russian troops.
Lyosha’s team prints the plastic shells of around 1,000 “candy bombs,” as these improvised explosive devices have come to be known, every week. But the Ukrainian officer who acts as the team’s military contact wants 1,500 a day, says “adv”, the nom de guerre of a second member of the group. Another set of amateurs, the Druk “Print”) Army, has churned out more than 30,000 candy bombs in the past four months. “Swat”, their leader, says that the production rate is growing.
And still more come from beyond Ukraine’s borders. Janis Ozols is the founder of the Latvia chapter of the Wild Bees, a group of volunteer weaponsmiths from outside Ukraine. He reckons at least 65,000 bomb shells have been shipped from Europe since November 2022.
5.The U.S. has finally implemented a ban on incandescent light bulbs. Consumers will only be able to purchase LED lights, which use less power to produce the same brightness. The U.S. is behind the times: The European Union banned the bulbs in 2012. Improved energy efficiency has been an underrated success in the U.S., which uses about as much electricity as it did 20 years ago, despite a growing population and economy.