Singur bill tables by Mamata government

The West Bengal government tabled a legislation in the state assembly to return a portion of the land acquired by the Left Front regime from "unwilling owners"(Aanichhuk chasi) for setting up the now abandoned Tata Motors small car(NANO) factory in Singur.

The 'Singur Land Rehabilitation and Development Bill, 2011' was placed in the house by commerce and industries minister Partha Chatterjee.

The bill seeks to scrap the 997.17-acre land lease with Tata Motors, enabling the government to take back the land to fulfil the Trinamool Congress's poll promise to return 400 acres to the farmers who were unwilling to sell their land.

Hours after Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee was sworn-in as the chief minister on May 20, the state cabinet's first decision was to return the land to the farmers.

The Trinamool Congress, decimated in the 2006 assembly polls, saw its political graph climb sharply after it spearheaded a peasant agitation against the state government's acquisition of land for the Nano small car project.

Faced with the sustained and intense protests in 2008, the Tata Motors shifted the plant to Sanand in Gujarat.

The agitation helped in turning the fortunes for the Trinamool, which in later years went from strength to strength to unseat the 34-year-old Left Front government in the recent assembly elections, and take over power in alliance with the Congress.

TOOTHBRUSH TO DETECT ORAL CANCER IN JUST 15 MINUTES

Toothbrush-like instrument that could detect oral cancer just in 15 minutes with a gentle touch.

In a breakthrough, scientists have developed a toothbrush-like instrument that could detect oral cancer just in 15 minutes with a gentle touch.

A team of scientists led by researchers at the Rice University have created a nano-bio-chip that was found to be 97 per cent "sensitive" and 93 per cent specific in detecting which patients had malignant or premalignant lesions.

The minimally invasive technique would deliver results in 15 minutes instead of several days, as lab-based diagnostics do now, the researchers said.

"And instead of an invasive, painful biopsy, this new procedure requires just a light brush of the lesion on the cheek or tongue with an instrument that looks like a toothbrush," they added.

"One of the key discoveries in this paper is to show that the miniaturised, noninvasive approach produces about the same result as the pathologists do," said lead researcher John McDevitt.

Oral cancer afflicts more than 300,000 people a year and the five-year survival rate is 60 per cent, but if cancer is detected early, that rate rises to 90 per cent, the journal Cancer Prevention Research reported.

McDevitt and his team are working to create an inexpensive chip that can differentiate premalignancies from the 95 per cent of lesions that will not become cancerous.

"This area of diagnostics and testing has been terribly challenging for the scientific and clinical community," McDevitt said, adding "Part of the problem is that there are no good tools currently available that work in a reliable way."

He said patients with suspicious lesions, usually discovered by dentists or oral surgeons, end up getting scalpel or punch biopsies as often as every six months.

"People trained in this area don't have any trouble finding lesions. The issue is the next step -- taking a chunk of someone's cheek. The heart of this paper is developing a more humane and less painful way to do that diagnosis, and our technique has shown remarkable success in early trials," McDevitt said.

source:www.deccanchronicle.com.