That hot cuppa can go a long way in helping fight cancer. A team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Toxicology Research (IITR) in Lucknow has found that polyphenols, a class of micronutrients found in both green and black tea, improve the efficacy of commonly-used anticancer drugs, such as cisplatin. Improving effectiveness of the drugs helps reduce the dosage. Apart from being light on the pocket, lowering the dosage helps reduce the harm these highly toxic drugs cause to normal, healthy cells. While the IITR study, recently published online in the journal Life Sciences, focused on cervical cancer, there is a possibility that the beneficial effects may extend to the treatment of tumours of other organs as well. Cisplatin is commonly used to treat a range of cancers including bladder, lung, ovarian, stomach and testicle cancers. According to IITR scientist Yogeshwar Shukla, who led the research, about six cups of tea a day should trigger the beneficial effect.

A machine to help you “see”

Researchers at IIT Kharagpur have designed a low-cost device to help vision-impaired people navigate unfamiliar terrain. The electronic travel assist, a prototype of which has been built, has a webcam, ultrasonic sensors and a tiny computer as its major parts. While the ultrasonic sensors detect objects along the path, the webcam will capture their images and feed them to the computer for analysis. Subsequently, information about the nature and distance of object will be passed on to the wearer through a headphone. “The present prototype captures the objects as static ones but later versions will have the ability to assess the speed of moving objects,” says biomedical scientist Manjunatha Mahadevappa, who is leading the project. Mahadevappa is hopeful that the navigational aid, comparable to those found in the West at a much higher price, will be available for use in India in five years.