11 FEBRUARY 2015: AAP tsunami crushes Modiwave in Delhi

Ø  The Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party swept to power with 67 seats in the 70-member Delhi Assembly, leaving only three to the Bharatiya Janata Party. The Congress tally was nil. The Congress had been in power for three consecutive terms in the State until 2013 and the BJP had won all seven Lok Sabha seats in May 2014. BJP’s chief ministerial candidate Kiran Bedi lost in Krishna Nagar, a seat won by Union Minister Harsh Vardhan five times in a row from 1993 to 2013. Mr. Kejriwal will be sworn in as Chief Minister on February 14, exactly a year after he quit the post after 49 days in power in February 2014.

Ø  The Aam Aadmi Party’s landslide victory is among the most comprehensive victories in the history of Indian elections. Only Sikkim has seen bigger sweeps, with one party having won all seats in the Assembly sometimes. Sikkim saw India’s three most comprehensive electoral wins ever: the Nar Bahadur Bhandari-led Sikkim Sangram Parishad, and the incumbent five-time Chief Minister Pawan Kumar Chamling’s Sikkim Democratic Front have both won all 32 seats in one election each. In 2004, Mr. Chamling’s party won 31 of the 32 seats. In terms of seat share, the Aam Aadmi Party’s performance is next only to these.

Ø  Scientists at the Indian Institute of Science have successfully tested an alternative to syringes for drug delivery. The method, tested on mice, delivers medicine through tiny capsules when triggered by a micro-shock wave. Developing methods for alternative delivery of drugs has gained importance considering the large number of infections that are spread through contaminated, non-sterilised syringes.  The researchers designed tiny biocapsules made of a polymer (spermidine-dextran sulfate or Sper–DS). The capsules are so small that 10 of the biggest ones could be placed in a length of one millimetre. The capsules are loaded with either insulin or the antibiotic ciprofloxacin. They are then placed on the infection site — for instance, external diabetic wounds — and are triggered by micro-shock waves produced by a handheld machine.

Ø  To be launched in 2019, the world’s biggest solar telescope based in Maui, Hawaii, would significantly improve the forecasting of space weather hazards, say researchers from the University of Sheffield in Britain. With a four-metre diameter primary mirror, the telescope will be able to pick up unprecedented detail on the surface of the Sun — the equivalent of being able to examine a one pound coin from 100 km away.

Ø  In an effort to deepen economic cooperation, Israel has offered its expertise and technological capabilities to India in its ambitious drive to clean up the Ganga. A preliminary offer on this was made when Amit Lang, Director-General of the Ministry of Economy, Israel, met Indian officials.

Ø  Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has won the newly instituted Charleston-EFG John Maynard Keynes Prize. Regarded as one of the foremost thinkers in the field of famine, poverty, social choice and welfare economics, Professor Sen has done ground-breaking work that has been academically influential and had a profound impact on the formation of development policy worldwide. Professor Sen will receive £7,500 to commission a work of art and will deliver the annual Charleston-EFG Keynes Lecture at the Charleston Festival in the U.K. This year’s lecture, scheduled for May 23, will be on “The economic consequences of austerity.”

Ø  Scientists have found that the earth’s inner core has its own smaller core within it, a discovery that may shed light on how our planet evolved. The discovery was made possible after a novel application of earthquake-reading technology by a research team at the University of Illinois and colleagues at Nanjing University in China.

Ø  Facebook announced a tie-up with Reliance Communications to launch Internet.org in India, bringing to the land of a billion-plus people a service that the social media giant says helps affordable Internet access but whose critics disapprove its restrictiveness. India now becomes the sixth destination for Internet.org, a Facebook-led initiative envisaged about a year-and-a-half back with six other founding partners, including Samsung and Qualcomm. The service has already been launched in Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, Colombia and Ghana. For the time being, the service has gone live in Maharashtra, Gujarat, A.P., T.N. and Kerala.