Monday, January 07, 2019

Quick notes: U-turn on e-commerce, Unsafe nuns...

  • Lobbyists win: Govt does U-turn on e-commerce policy after aggressive lobbying by MNCs. The sharp reversal comes barely a week after the govt had explicitly restricted private labels being sold by e-marketplaces


  • Unsafe nuns of India: The Associated Press blows the lid off decades-long sexual abuse of nuns by Catholic priests in India. The nuns AP interviewed—some decades younger than their abusers—described the fear of retribution and being isolated or even expelled from their community, which forced them to avoid making official complaints. “It’s a fear of being isolated if I speak the truth. If you do that, you have to go against your own community, your own religious superiors.”


  • Soul Vultures: The enemy within



  • English is the albatross that's strangling India:


  • The Keto Diet, Explained: We are fueled primarily by glucose, or blood sugar, much of which we derive from carbohydrates in foods like bread, fruit, potatoes, and sweets.  If glucose levels in the blood drop to really low levels, we’d pass out and die. But, interestingly, the body can’t store much glucose — only enough to last a couple of days. So if we forgo eating carbs for a few days, we need other ways to keep going. One of those is a process called ketogenesis.  In ketogenesis, our livers start to break down fat into a usable energy source called ketones bodies, or ketones for short. “Organs like the brain that normally rely primarily on glucose for fuel can begin to use a substantial amount of ketones. So ketones can stand in for glucose as fuel for the body when there’s a glucose shortage. It’s an amazing physiological adaption to starvation that allows tissues like the brain to survive”. 


  • Chang'e-4 rover now exploring Moon: The far side could be an excellent place to perform low-frequency radio astronomy, because it is shielded from the radio noise of Earth.


  • Raga Shukla Bilawal:



  • Africans singing "Kal ho na ho":



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