Glacier melting over a 47-year period has led to formation of seven new glacial lakes in western Himalayas

Preliminary findings of an ongoing study by researchers from IIT, Bombay, showed that glacier lakes underwent continuous changes between 1963 and 2010. Geographical Information System (GIS) tools and high resolution remote sensing technology were used to delineate glacier lakes situated in inaccessible Himalayan terrain. In all, 15 large glacier lakes situated at an elevation between 4069 meters to 5252 meters were chosen for monitoring the changes that occurred.

Continuous ice-melting due to glacier recession (loss of ice due to excess melting) caused the formation of seven new lakes near the mouth of the glaciers. These were formed as moraine-dammed lakes and the glacier-lake area was estimated to have increased approximately by 2591 sq.meters during the 47-year period. Moraine is a depositional feature of glacier. As the glacier starts moving, it accumulates small rocks, debris, ice fragments and soil.

There was no significant change in the area of eight other glacier lakes which were situated at a higher altitude and not created by melting. According to Farjana Sikandar Birajdar, lead author of the study, the melting of glaciers would reduce the ice mass balance even as it resulted in formation of new lakes with loose moraine. This in turn could lead to a sudden breach of the unstable moraine dams and the phenomenon of glacial lake outburst floods (GLOF), posing a serious hazard to settlements downstream. She said many previous studies in the Himayalan region revealed that the rate of melting was increasing. If the same trend continued, glaciers would vanish in the long-term, adversely impacting the storage of freshwater resources as also hydro-power generation.

Taxation the Medieval Ages Style - A case study: Bhutan, seems very similar to developed Italy

They say what goes on in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas, which means the funny things people do there shouldn't be taken back home. But the funny things that the Thimphu municipality get exported with the use of a single extra grey cell, to all other places. Maybe people in other dzongkhags think that all the brains must be in Thimphu so then all their plans must be perfect.

Inflation in Bhutan has never been low, hovering around 5-7%. The banks give interest of about 7% for your long term loans which means you lose money by keeping it in the bank. They lend it out for 14-16% and keep all your profit. But with the inflation reaching 13%, our cash value is going down faster than ever before.

In the midst of this, our decision makers, the people with blinders on, totally focussed only on their own department, as if things are not interconnected, have been raising land taxes and other taxes. Yes I totally agree that municipalities and local governments do have the authority and the right as well as obligation to raise taxes for the public good. But what I find unacceptable is that they raise taxes and then use the money by investing in totally unproductive enterprises.

For example, do they really need a multi-story parking lot? Do need to employ and keep hundreds of daily workers and pay their daily wages and benefits to do and redo the same work all year long. Example, cleaning the road drains and then throwing the muck just next to the drain. The first rainfall throws it all back into the drain and thus justifies the perennial need of these workers. They keeping blacktopping the roads only to have to do them again. As if it is not bad enough, they often dig up their own roads because they forgot something. They built an expressway with a very funny steel divider which keeps getting crashed into and before its repaired the barrier keeps getting stolen and then they again buy new ones and put them back in. Imagine if they had spent that money on providing roads to people in the town who don't even have a basic road!

The thing with any bureaucracy is that if there is money, it will be spent. There's a law written about that sort of thing. But the thing with a municipality is that even if there is no money, they can raise it by increasing taxes and they are doing it!

If only there was RTI we would know exactly where the money is going and how many times they are doing the same works! Why must the owner of an inaccessible plot of land in the jungles of serbithang pay more taxes so that Norzin Lam can have more lights or have better blacktopping every year? Makes no sense to me and sounds very inequitable. Now that they have totally maxxed out the use of their land and not left enough for parking, the TCC is going to raise more taxes from everybody to build them a multi-story parking facility!

But my main point is that though the tax may not be too high, for some it is. Thimphu's brainstorm of an idea has now reached gelephu where the income levels are much lower. Without they asking for it, many farmers now fall under the municipal boundary. They now have to pay real cash out of their pockets. Where will this money come if they don't sell their land?

Those who can make do will only feel further justified in jacking up the prices of whatever they make their living off of. A taxi driver will pressured to charge more, a farmer will feel pressured to charge more for his produce, a house owner will feel pressured and justified to charge a higher rent. These are not rational thoughts. Just like a truck driver adds 30% to his hire rate everytime the fuel prices goes up, even though the fuel price add only 2% to his total cost. These irrational reactions to external stimuli like taxes is what adds to inflation. There is no point arguing that it is irrational. That's how the economy works.

The losers of course are those who have to pay more taxes but don't get the benefits from the taxes, like those living in the hinterland that some planner decided now falls into the urban setting.

But inflation has now become a serious problem in Bhutan. Let's wake up and find ways to control it. Use taxes only at the BST level (indirect) and control the direct ones. Our economy is not strong enough. Only some people have become rich. Most others remain as as they were 10 years ago.

Researchers identify present day Turkey as origin of Indo-European languages

 By using novel methods developed for tracing the origins of virus outbreaks, researchers say they have identified present-day Turkey as the homeland of the Indo-European language family. The international team, led by Quentin Atkinson, a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, used computational methods analyzing words from more than 100 ancient and contemporary languages, as well as geographical and historical data. By doing so, the scientists say they have pinned down the origin, about 8,000 years ago, of the largest global language to the region of Anatolia. 

 The results, published in Friday’s issue of the magazine Science, coincide with the “Anatolian hypothesis.” Based on archeological data, it states that Indo-European languages spread with the expansion of agriculture from Anatolia, beginning 8,000 to 9,500 years ago. The prevailing theory among linguists, however, is the “Steppe hypothesis,” explained Michael Dunn, a linguist the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands. The hypothesis is based primarily on an approach to reconstruct the ancestral language. By doing so, linguists have found that most Indo-European languages have related words for “wheel” and “wagon.” This points to the steppes of present-day Russia, 6,000 years ago, as the birthplace of the language family, because this is where the widespread use of chariots, an important technological advance, is thought to have originated. “Archeologists and linguists have had different favorite theories on the language origins,” said Dunn, a co-author of the recent paper. “But now, new research like ours provides linguistic support for the Anatolian hypothesis.” The present study builds upon previous work from Atkinson that came to similar conclusions in 2003. It did not, however, include geographical data, as the new study does. The study is the first to use the novel methods on the Indo-European languages, a family of more than 400 tongues including English, Persian and Hindi. The languages are spoken on every continent by a total of 3 billion people. “This paper provides strong statistical evidence that unequivocally supports the Anatolian hypothesis,” said Andrew Kitchen, a postdoctoral scholar at Pennsylvania State University, who uses similar research methods. Yet Dunn does not expect the controversy to be settled, as supporters of the Steppe hypothesis continue collecting evidence strengthening their line of thought. “These things take a lot of time in science, but in the long run, I would bet on our theory,” Dunn said. “You just can’t explain away the data.”

Multilingual teen finds vibrant online tribe of fellow polyglots

Very interesting the following yet as a cultural multilingual I do not fully agree to the academic explanation below; Age is factor as Sir Karl Popper explained time ago!

Excerpt from The Age, (link at Title above)

Hyperpolyglots have been the objects of curiosity at least since the 19th century, when Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti of Bologna was said to have mastered more than 50 languages. For nearly as long, people have debated whether their ability was innate or learned.
The answer, neurolinguists are now discovering, is a bit of both, said Loraine Obler, a linguist and a professor at the City University of New York.
''There are people whose brains are set up to do language learning,'' she said, ''the same way some people are more talented at drawing.'' Also, she added, ''The brain's ability to absorb increases as we know more languages. Having a second language at a young age helps you learn a third, even if they're unrelated.''