What was the theme of the second edition of Belt and Road Forum (BRF)?

WHO has released New Guidelines on 10 Ways to Use Digital Health Technology to Boost People's Health. The guidelines were based on a 2-year-long research study by WHO on digital technologies which was inclusive of consultations with global experts. It demonstrates that health systems need to provide response for the increasing availability of information. People should be assured of their own data being secure and not be put at risk because of their access to information on sensitive health issues such as sexual and reproductive health issues, thus in turn protecting individual's privacy.

The research team from IIT Madras has used a multi-lingual Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scheme to develop a method for reading documents in Bharati script. The researchers have also developed a finger-spelling method that can be used by hearing-impaired persons to generate sign language, in collaboration with TCS Mumbai. The Bharati script is a conglomeration of 9 Indian languages, namely, Devnagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil. In the last 10 years, Professor V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy's research team at IIT Madras has worked on developing this script. he OCR scheme first segments the document into 2 parts, text and non-text. After this, the text is separated into paragraphs, sentences words and letters, where every letter is recognised as a character in ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) or Unicode. The letter again has several components, namely, the basic consonant, consonant modifiers, vowels.

Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC), under the Ministry of Finance, is organizing the World Customs Organisation (WCO) for Asia-Pacific region in Kochi, Kerala from 8th to 10th May 2019. As India currently holds a seat of Vice Chairperson of Asia Pacific region, it is hosting this meeting in this capacity. Pranab Kumar Das, Chairman of CBIC will chair the meeting. It will discuss the progress being made in carrying forward various initiatives and programmes of WCO, in promoting, securing and facilitating cross-border trade in the Asia Pacific region. Participants include customs delegations from over 20 countries of Asia Pacific region and senior officials of WCO and its regional bodies namely Regional Intelligence Liaoning Office (RILO) and Regional Office for Capacity Building (ROCB).

The last captive white tiger at the Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP) in Borivali, Mumbai named Bajirao died due to old age related problems at the age of 18. He was born at the SGNP in 2001 to tigress Renuka and tiger Sidharth. He suffered from chronic ankylosis on left shoulder and chronic senile generalised arthritis for the last four years.The tiger's autopsy was conducted by the pathology department of the Bombay Veterinary College(BVC), Mumbai.

Researchers at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai have identified a new function for Serotonin, a monoamine neurotransmitter. The serotonin may help treat neurological diseases.The results of the study were published in the journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)".A research paper jointly led by Vidita A. Vaidya and UllasKolthur-Seetharam from TIFR, in collaboration with Ashok Vaidya from KHS (Kasturba Health Society), had found that stress buster Serotonin is involved in the generation of new mitochondria in neurons, increased cellular respiration and fuel (ATP- adenosine triphosphate) in the cell.The recent discovery establishes that serotonin signaling could be used to prevent mitochondrial abnormalities and neuronal loss.

Microsoft's Project 'ReWeave' will help to preserve traditional weaving forms by upskilling workers, designing and marketing products, and creating sustainable livelihood options. Tata Trusts' initiative, Antaran's main objective is to rejuvenate ailing handloom clusters through an end-to-end programme that would help artisans to become designers and entrepreneurs.

Stockholm International peace research institute (SIPRI) has launched a new initiative named Global Registry of Violent Deaths (GReVD) to establish the annual number of violent deaths worldwide.GReVD will count deaths caused by all forms of violence and display these in an open-source database and enable monitoring of progress on the world's commitment to 'significantly reduce all forms of violence and related death rates everywhere' by 2030 as set out in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)-Goal 16. The database will enable policymakers and researchers and the general public to track trends in violence at global, regional, national, provincial, city and municipal levels. GReVD will hold a single entry for every violent death, including perpetrator, time, location, victim and type of violence. The sources will be verifiable news reports of lethal events and processing will involve machine coding to manage the volume of entries, as well as human coding to ensure accuracy and consistency.

Researchers at the IIT Roorkee have identified a new method to detect two of the worst forms of cancer in women - breast and ovarian cancer. The research published in the journal, 'FASEB Bioadvances' details the use of whole saliva as a body fluid for early detection of breast and ovarian cancers, as opposed to the traditional method of using blood samples. The research team, led by Professor Kiran Ambatipudi from the institute's biotechnology department, identified certain proteins present in the saliva which act as potential biomarkers indicative of breast and ovarian cancer metastasis.

The Union Ministry of AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy) and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) on April 22, 2019 signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for cooperation in research and education in areas of traditional systems of medicine and its integration with modern science. The MoU enables collaboration in pursuit of Data mining and analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to facilitate concepts such as "Traditional knowledge inspired drug discovery and development" and "Food as Medicine".

Department of Biotechnology (DBT) working under ministry of science and technology has recently launched human tissue mapping project called MANAV: Human Atlas Initiative. It has been launched to improve understanding on human physiology. Objective of this initiative is to map every single tissue of human body to find out deepest information and roles of tissues and cells linked to a variety of ailments. Department of Biotechnology has issued funds of Rs 13 cr to two institutions in Pune, Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research (IISER) and National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS).