Nature has its own way of reminding us that we must not take it for granted. The unfortunate hurricane followed by heavy rain is not just an epic tragedy that will leave us shocked for years to come. Navtej Kohli expresses his condolences….

The death toll from flooding and landslides in El Salvador following the days of downpour has reached 124. President Mauricio Funes described the disaster as ‘a tragedy’ and said that the damages it caused are ‘incalculable’. He’s declared a national emergency.

According to the officials the capital San Salvador and central San Vicente are the worst affected regions. San Vicente is in fact nearly disconnected due to landslides and collapsed bridges. Some of the other hardest hit regions include La Libertad, La Paz and Cuscatlan.

Up till now there have been reports of over 60 people missing and more than 7,000 are in shelters.

Rescue workers recovered bodies from the wreckage of homes in the town of San Vicente.  “We rescued a man this morning who had fractures, and a little girl” a local told a news agency. He with his son crossed through the floodwater and saved them both. The girl is now with her parents.

“My son and I crossed through the floodwater and brought them here, and now she is with her parents.”

Rain triggered massive rock slides from the Chichontepec volcano also devastated a lot of homes in Verapaz and San Vicente province.

There is no electricity supply and clean water in the large parts of El Salvador. The death toll continues to rise since hurricane Ida, which has now strengthened to category II storm, was hovering over the Gulf of Mexico.

Hey! I’m Navtej Kohli ,When I was a child, I wondered why stoplights are Red, yellow, green. To me, it made no sense! I used to make paper traffic lights and adorn it with every color except for the above three. My inquisitive mind always questioned the relevance of these colors in the stoplight. My father
gave me n number of arguments, but to no avail. It was hard to convince me, until i found this:

Stoplights are red, yellow, and green, because traffic officials, early on copied the code system railroad engineers devised for track systems
controlling the trains.

The goal of the railroad engineers in crafting this code was to prevent often fatal train collisions, by giving the trains advance warning. Therefore they did not take their task lightly in selecting the symbolic colors for the signals.

Red, the color of blood, proved a logical choice for the stop signal, as for thousands of years, this color forbade danger. The color alone,
railroad engineers reasoned, should give people cause to pause, to abide by the signal, and to stop or suffer the consequences of death and destruction.

Engineers used the trial and error method in selecting the other colors. The first trial in the 1830s, that of choosing green for the caution signal, and clear for the go signal, failed miserably. Clear as a choice for the go signal, varied slightly from the light cast from typical street lamps, or from the glare of the sunlight, and, thus could quite easily be mistaken for the go signal…after the fact.

This failure prompted the railroad engineers to alter their color selections to red for stop, green for go, and yellow for caution. Traffic engineers, either lacking in ingenuity or a work ethic, scurried off with this system of color coding, and instituted the very first electric stoplight in Cleveland, Ohio in 1914. The first signal did not include the color yellow for caution, but that was later added within a few years. Railroad
engineers, not traffic engineers, should be credited for the lives saved in the interim, by their system of coding warning signals red, yellow, and green.

For more such cool stuff, keep posted on Navtej Kohli Blog

Navtej Kohli found this informational piece of news on internet. A study suggests that excessive alcohol consumption causes damage to the pancreas. If you want to know more, read on:

Canadian scientists have made a significant progress in understanding how excessive alcohol consumption causes damage to the pancreas.

The research conducted by experts from the University of Toronto and University Health Network involved experiments on mice.

Lead researcher Herbert Gaisano says that several studies have shown previously that rodents fed on alcohol-rich diet, and then exposed to a
drug called carbachol, develop an inflammation of the pancreas (pancreatitis), which resembles the pancreatitis seen in individuals who consume an excessive amount of alcohol.

He also says that it has been suggested previously that the rodents develop pancreatitis because the alcohol and carbachol exposure cause cells in the pancreas to release vesicles containing degradative proteins known as enzymes at inappropriate places.

In the latest study, he adds, a protein called VAMP8 was found to have an important role in coordinating the inappropriate release of enzyme-containing vesicles in mice exposed to alcohol and carbachol.

According to Gaisano, mice lacking VAMP8 showed reduced pancreatitis after exposure to alcohol and carbachol, during the study.