Testing the Novel Weapons Hypothesis of the Argentine Ant Venom on Amphibians.

The globally invasive Argentine ant () possesses a venom lethal to some amphibian species in the invaded range. To test the novel weapons hypothesis (NWH), the effects of the toxin on the cohabiting amphibian species in the ant's native range need to be investigated. The invader should benefit from the novel chemical in the invaded range, because the species are not adapted, but the venom should not be effective in the native range.

Production and characterization of bioemulsifier by .

The current study evaluated MCC 2546 for its potential to produce a bioemulsifier (BE). Screening methods performed for BE production by MCC 2546 showed good lipase activity, positive drop collapse test, and oil-spreading activity. Furthermore, it showed maximum emulsification activity (225 EU/ml) and emulsification index (E 50%) at 37°C in Luria Bertani broth at 72 h with olive oil as a substrate.

Combining socioeconomic and biophysical data to identify people-centric restoration opportunities.

Designing restoration projects requires integrating socio-economic and cultural needs of local stakeholders for enduring and just outcomes. Using India as a case study, we demonstrate a people-centric approach to help policymakers translate global restoration prioritization studies for application to a country-specific context and to identify different socio-environmental conditions restoration programs could consider when siting projects. Focusing, in particular, on poverty quantified by living standards and land tenure, we find that of the 579 districts considered here, 116 of the poorest districts have high biophysical restoration potential (upper 50th percentile of both factors).

The mismatch of narratives and local ecologies in the everyday governance of water access and mosquito control in an urbanizing community.

Mosquito-borne disease presents a significant threat to urban populations, but risk can be uneven across a city due to underlying environmental patterns. Urban residents rely on social and economic processes to control the environment and mediate disease risk, a phenomenon known as everyday governance. We studied how households employed everyday governance of urban infrastructure relevant to mosquito-borne disease in Bengaluru, India to examine if and how inequalities in everyday governance manifest in differences in mosquito control.

Gynaecological Cancers in India: The Less Heard Perspectives of Healthcare Providers.

There has been mounting evidence on the role of healthcare providers in chronic illnesses such as cancer. The specific complexities in their roles to enable health are less heard. Gynaecological cancers have several undercurrents beyond the obvious.

Legitimacy, Shared Understanding and Exchange of Resources: Co-managing Lakes Along an Urban-Rural Gradient in Greater Bengaluru Metropolitan Region, India.

Co-management is increasingly seen as a way forward in natural resource management and collective goods provisioning, especially in the management of urban commons. Co-management entails sharing of power between actors, including elements such as exchange of information and resources as well as changes in regulations favouring the development of common goals among actors. In this paper, we try to understand if and how preconditions of legitimacy, shared understanding and exchange of resources combine to facilitate the co-management of lakes in Greater Bengaluru Metropolitan Region (GBMR), India.

Improved household living standards can restore dry tropical forests.

Despite multiple approaches over the last several decades to harmonize conservation and development goals in the tropics, forest-dependent households remain the poorest in the world. Durable housing and alternatives to fuelwood for cooking are critical needs to reduce multi-dimensional poverty. These improvements also potentially reduce pressure on forests and alleviate forest degradation.

Using Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, and Planet satellite data to map field-level tillage practices in smallholder systems.

Remote sensing can be used to map tillage practices at large spatial and temporal scales. However, detecting such management practices in smallholder systems is challenging given that the size of fields is smaller than historical readily-available satellite imagery. In this study we used newer, higher-resolution satellite data from Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, and Planet to map tillage practices in the Eastern Indo-Gangetic Plains in India.

Employing innovative evidence-backed community processes for maternal health services by Dalit women.

Background: Health care services express social and structural inequalities, especially for Dalits and women, due to the indignity and discrimination experienced in health care facilities. Jagrutha Mahila Sanghatane (JMS), a grass-roots organization led by neo-literate Dalit women in rural Karnataka in India, adopted a human rights-based social accountability (SA) approach to address discrimination and dignity in accessing maternal health services. This approach integrated community-based evidence with multi-pronged and multi-level accountability processes with their goal of socio-political empowerment.

Indian sewage microbiome has unique community characteristics and potential for population-level disease predictions.

Sewage wastewater pollutes water and poses a public health issue but it could also prove useful in certain research domains. Sewage is a complex niche relevant for research concerning 'one-health', human health, pollution and antibiotic resistance. Indian gut microbiome is also understudied due to sampling constraints and sewage could be used to explore it.

Economic costs of protecting islands from invasive alien species.

Biological invasions represent a key threat to insular systems and have pronounced impacts across environments and economies. The ecological impacts have received substantial focus, but the socioeconomic impacts are poorly synthesized across spatial and temporal scales. We used the InvaCost database, the most comprehensive assessment of published economic costs of invasive species, to assess economic impacts on islands worldwide.

Health-Related Quality of Life and Associated Factors Among Adults with Type-2 Diabetes Mellitus: A Community-Based Cross-Sectional Study in Rural Kerala, India.

Background: India is the second-largest country in the world with an estimated 77 million people living with diabetes. Persons with diabetes reported lower quality of life when compared to non-diabetes persons. There are significant associations between poor health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and adverse health outcomes among diabetes people.

Integrated drought monitoring and assessment using multi-sensor and multi-temporal earth observation datasets: a case study of two agriculture-dominated states of India.

In the current scenario of climate change, there has been a substantial increase in the frequency and severity of drought events. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate spatio-temporal characteristics of different drought events to plan for water resource utilization. The present study aims to assess and quantify the impact of meteorological, hydrological, and agricultural drought events from 2001 to 2017 over two large states of India (i.

The Spectral Species Concept in Living Color.

Biodiversity monitoring is an almost inconceivable challenge at the scale of the entire Earth. The current (and soon to be flown) generation of spaceborne and airborne optical sensors (i.e.

Alumina-Based Bifunctional Catalyst for Efficient CO Fixation into Epoxides at Atmospheric Pressure.

The quest toward sustainability and decarbonization demands the development of methods for efficient carbon dioxide capture and utilization. The nonreductive CO fixation into epoxides to prepare cyclic carbonates has gained attention in recent years. In this work, we report the development of guanidine hydrochloride-functionalized γ alumina (γ-AlO), prepared using green solvents, as an efficient bifunctional catalyst for CO fixation.

Structural Transformation and Employment Generation in India: Past Performance and the Way Forward.

Historical experience suggests that a sustained rise in per capita incomes and improvement in employment conditions is not attainable without a structural transformation that moves surplus labour from agriculture and other informal economic activities to higher productivity activities in the non-farm economy. In this paper, I analyse India's performance from a cross-country comparative perspective, estimating the growth semi-elasticity of structural change. Using a cross-country panel regression, I estimate the effectiveness of growth in moving workers away from agricultural and informal activities as compared to other developing countries at similar levels of per capita income.

How Comparable are India's Labour Market Surveys?

The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy's (CMIE) Consumer Pyramid Household surveys have emerged as an important source of regular labour market data for India. Given the differences in methods in data collection between the CMIE and official employment sources, it becomes exceedingly important to establish some comparability between the government and the CMIE datasets. With the release of the official Periodic Labour Force Surveys for 2017-18, we now have an overlap between the official datasets and CMIE datasets.

The absence of alternative stable states in vegetation cover of northeastern India.

Globally, forests and savannah are shown to be alternative stable states for intermediate rainfall regimes. This has implications for how these ecosystems respond to changing rainfall conditions. However, we know little about the occurrence of alternative stable states in forest ecosystems in India.

"God will decide her fate": the trajectories of women with traumatic spinal cord injury in India.

Purpose: Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) is one of the most devastating physical disabilities that unexpectedly affects physical, mental, familial, social, and economic aspects of people's lives. This article analyses the trajectories of Indian women with SCI as they attempt to access health care after the injury.

Methods: Based on a qualitative research paradigm, this study adopts a phenomenological approach and conducts in-depth interviews with 21 Indian women with traumatic SCI.

Down and out? The gendered impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on India's labour market.

The Covid-19 pandemic has created unprecedented disruptions in labour markets across the world including loss of employment and decline in incomes. Using panel data from India, we investigate the differential impact of the shock on labour market outcomes for male and female workers. We find that, conditional on being in the workforce prior to the pandemic, women were seven times more likely to lose work during the nationwide lockdown, and conditional on losing work, eleven times more likely to return to work subsequently, compared to men.

How Seafood Wholesale Markets Matter for Urban Food Security: Evidence from Chennai, India.

Urban sites gather poverty in particular locations and often require bulk food system approaches for addressing prevalent food security and nutrition needs. The food systems that service them are, however, characterized by perishability and large irregularities in supply. Seafood is currently recognized as contributing in a major way to food security and nutrition, and it is to assessing the role of wholesale markets in meeting the needs of the urban poor that this paper is directed.

Invariants in Polarimetric Interferometry: A Non-Abelian Gauge Theory.

The discovery of magnetic fields close to the M87 black hole using very long baseline interferometry by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration utilized the novel concept of "closure traces," that are immune to element-based aberrations. We take a fundamentally new approach to this promising tool of polarimetric very long baseline interferometry, using ideas from the geometric phase and gauge theories. The multiplicative distortion of polarized signals at the individual elements are represented as gauge transformations by general 2×2 complex matrices, so the closure traces now appear as gauge-invariant quantities.