This paper deals with the acute toxicity of Sugar factory effluent on freshwater catfish, Mystus vittatus (Bloch), at different concentration and duration of exposure on the mortality and ethological alterations. The LC50 for 96 hours of sugar factory effluent for Mystus vittatus was 3.10% (v/v). The result also revealed that mortality rate depends upon concentrations of effluent and duration of exposure. The effluent exposed test fish showed alterations in behavioural responses. The behavioural alterations of Mystus vittatus during the present experiment (...) was found to depend on both duration of exposure and increase in concentration of the effluent and duration of exposure. The mortality rate was found to be directly proportional to the concentration of effluent. Thus, the present revealed that fish, Mystus vittatus are sensitive to distillery wastewater and can be used as biological indicators. (shrink)

Recently there is a renewed academic interest in religion bringing it back on the global political agenda. Religion in the post modern global order is fast emerging as a new organizing principle in the face of multi-polarity, trans-nationality and sweeping pluralisation of peoples. Contrary to the secularist self believe, the modern has failed to take over the tradition including religion. Rather a logical opposite seems to be happening, questioning the very presumptions of the modernity project. The present paper is a (...) narrative on this creative tension in the religious modern and post modern. The paper is crafted into four sections. First section seeks to pin down the genesis of “religious” in the search for social order and consciousness beyond the material world. Second section deals with the unfolding of enlightenment project and its manifest consequence with the birth of secularism master theory. Third section delves deep into the immediate Indian religious lived experiences under foreign rule up to the sweeping spell of globalisation. Fourth and last part of the essay makes a case for universality of a multicultural world and religious secularism. (shrink)

The present investigation was undertaken to investigate the acute toxicity of cadmium, a heavy metal widely detected in the aquatic environment due to natural effects and anthropogenic activities, in freshwater teleost, Channa punctata (Bloch). The experiments for the bioassay were performed in semi-static test condition according to the standard guidelines. The behavioural changes in the fish were observed for all tested concentrations of the metal. The data obtained for bioassay were analyzed for median lethal concentrations (LC ) of the metal (...) by SPSS computer software. The LC 50 50 values, estimated by SPSS, with 95% confidence level were found to be:20.589 (18.326-23.221), 17.133 (14.840- 19.734), 11.815 (9.696 – 13.850) mg/L and 9.908 (7.635-12381) mg/L for cadmium chloride at 24, 48, 72 and 96 h exposure, respectively. (shrink)

Functional diversity holds the promise of understanding ecosystems in ways unattainable by taxonomic diversity studies. Underlying this promise is the intuition that investigating the diversity of what organisms actually do—i.e. their functional traits—within ecosystems will generate more reliable insights into the ways these ecosystems behave, compared to considering only species diversity. But this promise also rests on several conceptual and methodological—i.e. epistemic—assumptions that cut across various theories and domains of ecology. These assumptions should be clearly addressed, notably for the sake (...) of an effective comparison and integration across domains, and for assessing whether or not to use functional diversity approaches for developing ecological management strategies. The objective of this contribution is to identify and critically analyze the most salient of these assumptions. To this aim, we provide an “epistemic roadmap” that pinpoints these assumptions along a set of historical, conceptual, empirical, theoretical, and normative dimensions. (shrink)

Coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19), produced by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has become a global pandemic, giving rise to a serious health threat globally. The global Covid-19 pandemic is a setback for sustainable development and compromise the world commitment to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The measures taken to control the spread of the virus and the slowdown of economic activities during lockdown have significant effects on the environment. Therefore, this review discuss the indirect positive and negative (...) impacts of Covid-19 pandemic towards sustainable environment. This study indicates that, the pandemic situation significantly improves air quality in different cities across the world, reduces the emission of greenhouse gases, and decreases water and noise pollution, which may help in the restoration of the ecosystem. In addition, there are also some negative impact of Covid-19, such as increase of medical waste, haphazard use and disposal of disinfectants, mask, and gloves; and burden of untreated wastes continuously endangering the environment. It points to the fact that the net effect has been positive; in terms of reduction in greenhouse emissions, oil exploration activities, and pollution. It is expected that the proper implementation of the proposed suggestion might be helpful for the global environmental sustainability. (shrink)

Facial Expression conveys non-verbal cues, which plays an important role in interpersonal relations. The Cognitive Emotion AI system is the process of identifying the emotional state of a person. The main aim of our study is to develop a robust system which can detect as well as recognize human emotion from live feed. There are some emotions which are universal to all human beings like angry, sad, happy, surprise, fear, disgust and neutral. The methodology of this system is based on (...) two stages- facial detection is done by extraction of Haar Cascade features of a face using Viola Jones algorithm and then the emotion is verified and recognized using Artificial Intelligence Techniques. The system will take image or frame as an input and by providing the image to the model the model will perform the preprocessing and feature selection after that it will be predict the emotional state. (shrink)