Reports

A languid and sunny Sunday, an ostensibly picnic mood, some flashes of brilliance here and there, and a seamier look at literature brought the three-day Bangalore Literature Festival langurously to a close here today. The highlight of closing day was a tête-à-tête – ‘Mera kuchh saman, tumhare paas pada hai’ – between lyricist-filmmaker Gulzar and film writer Bhawana Somaaya. Dressed in his resplendent, trademark white kurta pajama, Gulzar started off from the point that he himself had in the...

The National Green Tribunal (NGT) on Friday directed the Union ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) to respond to applications challenging diversion of 10,000 acres of Amrit Mahal Kavals grassland ecosystems to a variety of public sector and commercial projects by October 30 or face serious consequences. The South Zone bench of the NGT, based in Chennai, warned the ministry that failure to comply, by filing an appropriate response, would attract a fine of Rs1 lakh in each of the two...

Businesses across India can now deploy graphics-accelerated virtual desktops for their employees. And this, they will be able to do cost-effectively anywhere, across platforms and on any device with the adoption of NVIDIA's Grid technology. Servers from IT majors like Dell, Cisco, HP and IBM have started incorporating NVDIA's Grid into their desktop virtualisation solutions. Combined with enterprise virtualisation software from Centrix, Microsoft or VMware, these solutions can deliver GPU...

Scientists from the US and Cambodia have developed a novel and rapid way to test whether the most common and lethal form of malaria is resistant to artemisinin, the key anti-malarial drug. “In the race against time to stop the spread of artemisinin-resistant malaria, new diagnostic tools are urgently needed to identify and track resistant parasites. These simple in vitro and ex vivo ring-stage survival assays (RSAs) can clearly identify artemisinin-resistant, slow-clearing Plasmodium falciparum...

If you thought the catchphrase “taking it to the next level” was one of the most exasperating corporate clichés you had heard, you might want to do a rethink. Rajiv Chilakalapudi, the man behind the biggest success story of the Indian animation industry – Chhota Bheem, wants to do exactly that: take his story to the next level. He wants to do this by enlarging the 2D animation legend on to a 3D canvas. For one, the next version of Chhota Bheem, reckoned to be a Rs 200 crore brand now, will have...

No, the Karnataka animation industry is not planning to catch them young. That may come in later; but it will nevertheless start with those who catch the young – faculties. The state government, in collaboration with the Association of Bangalore Animation Industry (ABAI), will launch a Train-The-Trainer Institute in the city next month to train up faculty members from across the state who teach animation techniques to young professionals. The institute, which will be located in HSR Layout, is...

The lesser-known cousin of Bangalore’s IT/ITes industry, the animation-visual effects-gaming-comics sector, or AVGC for short, is looking out for that great leap forward. The promise to that effect came from minister for information technology, biotechnology, and science and technology, SR Patil. The minister, who inaugurated a two-day industry meet in the city on Wednesday, asserted that his government would do all it takes to make the city the most preferred and lucrative outsourcing...

Prominent players of the digital content industry will gather in the city next week to participate in the annual summit of the Association of Bangalore Animation Industry (ABAI). The AVGC (Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming and Comics) sector forms a significant portion of the fast growing digital content industry. This segment in India was pegged at $685 million in 2011 by Deloitte and NASSCOM, growing at 18-20% CAGR. In recent years, the Karnataka government has been launching initiatives to...

In a decision, being described as unprecedented and significant, the National Green Tribunal has ordered a status quo on all project activities proposed in the ecologically-fragile Amrit Kaval grasslands of Challakere talkuk in Chitradurga district. More than 10,000 acres of this grassland had been diverted by the Karnataka government for nuclear, defence and scientific projects. On Wednesday, the National Green Tribunal (South Zone), Chennai, comprising Justice P Jyothimani and expert member R...

For a water-scarce city where there's a vehicle for every two persons, a cutdown in water consumption towards cleaning cars would be a most welcome step. A high-pressure car washer launched on Tuesday can bring down this water consumption by 55 per cent — something that may be welcomed by many. "By falling back on the usual way of cleaning cars with buckets, one would end up using as many as four of them — that would be roughly 100 litres of water. However, with a high-pressure washer, you would...