| 
Technology ensures timely healthcare for pregnant women
- Health Department authorities have successfully used mobile phone technology to provide timely healthcare to pregnant women and infants in Karnataka.
- Mother and Child Tracking System (MCTS), an innovative initiative launched by the Department of Health and Family Welfare in January last year, is aimed at tracking pregnant women throughout their pregnancy period and providing medical services to them as per the guidelines of the World Health Organisation.
- It also tracks children until they get full immunisation.
- MCTS had won Innovators' Challenge Award instituted by Rockefeller Foundation and mHealth Alliance.
- The jurisdictional Auxiliary Nurse Midwives (ANMs) register pregnant women and issue a Thayi card.
- ANMs will monitor services given to pregnant women and children and inform the data centre about it by sending an SMS .
Contraband drugs destroyed in public
- Heroin, intoxicating tablets and marijuana worth over Rs. 100 crore in the international market were burned in a public place
- Officials said these contraband drugs had been seized in different raids in the hills over a year.
- Though the plants were periodically destroyed, the farmers continued to indulge in this lucrative business as the interior fields and high mountains were not easily accessible to officials.
A line of defence for zebras
- Scientists claim to have finally solved the mystery of why zebras evolved their distinctive black and white stripes — to keep blood-sucking flies at bay.
- The pattern of narrow stripes makes zebras “unattractive” to the flies.
- From a white coat, you get unpolarised light while black horizontally-polarised light [light waves move along a horizontal plane]
- Unpolarised light waves travel along any and every plane, and are much less attractive to flies. As a result, white-coated horses are much less troubled by horseflies than their dark-coloured relatives.
