It can kill bacteria harmful to humans coconut water

BRAINSTORMING: A student participating in a discussion on climate change in Chennai on Saturday.

Mumbai: In a move that will provide impetus to development of innovation, the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) will now facilitate dissemination, commercialization and public utilization of inventions by students and faculty members. It would be done in collaboration with Intellectual Ventures, a company that deals with funding inventions in institutes across the country.

The Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and the Petroleum Conservation Research Association (PCRA) have initiated a two-year study on saving fuel and ways to achieve better traffic management. The study will assess fuel emission by vehicles under different driving conditions and ways to save fuel in Delhi and Mumbai.

Mumbai: In a few months from now, IIT Bombay's vehicles like buses, cars and ambulances could well be run by using fuel produced from the first campus bio-diesel plant in India -- installed by students of the institute's chemical engineering department.

A professor in electrical engineering at the Delhi IIT will team up with a researcher of the University of British Columbia to conduct joint research on the most pressing problems of wireless communication system design. The award to the Indo-Canadian team is at the behest of the International Research Chairs Initiative (IRCI).

LUCKNOW: Taking serious note of illegal mining along river with the help of heavy machines in Uttar Pradesh, the high court on Friday constituted a probe committee to be presided by the Geological Survey of India. The court has directed the committee to submit its report in a sealed cover to the court by May 10.

Engineering graduates return to their villages in Punjab to practise organic farming, fight pesticide overuse

Online Farming

* Agropedia, an open source encyclopaedia for agriculture, has been launched by the government (http://agropedia.iitk.ac.in)
* It disseminates information to farmers and enables sharing of knowledge amongst them
* The site is a follow-up to a-Aqua, an online agriculture Q&A forum