Pavan Kumar

Forest, Ecology and Environment Minister Eshwar B Khandre and forest officials blame the lack of central funds as one of the major reasons for the state not perusing the matter.

Faced with a shortage of funds and dwindling student numbers, the Hampi Kannada Uni- versity, started 33 years ago to foster research, is facing an existential crisis.

While more than 85 per cent of the scientific studies are conducted in tiger reserves and the Western Ghats, the focus has now shifted from tigers and elephants to lesser-known species.

Speaking to DH over the phone, Narwade, BNHS Deputy Director and one of the authors of the report, called for a further study of the species as they had 'not conducted any DNA or scientific tests on it'.

The Waqf Board is claiming at least 53 historical monuments across Karnataka, including the famous Gol Gumbaz, Ibrahim Rauza, Bara Kaman in Vijayapura, the forts at Bidar and Kalaburagi, as its own.

Breast cancer remains a major public health concern, and early detection is crucial for improving survival rates. Metabolomics offers the potential to develop non-invasive screening and diagnostic tools based on metabolic biomarkers. However, the inherent complexity of metabolomic datasets and the high dimensionality of biomarkers complicates the identification of diagnostically relevant features, with multiple studies demonstrating limited consensus on the specific metabolites involved. Unlike previous studies that rely on singular feature selection techniques such as Partial Least Square (PLS) or LASSO regression, this research combines supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods with random sampling strategies, offering a more robust and interpretable approach to feature selection. This study aimed to identify a parsimonious and robust set of biomarkers for breast cancer diagnosis using metabolomics data. Plasma samples from 185 breast cancer patients and 53 controls (from the Cooperative Human Tissue Network, USA) were analyzed. This study also overcomes the common issue of dataset imbalance by using propensity score matching (PSM), which ensures reliable comparisons between cancer and control groups. We employed Univariate Naïve Bayes, L2-regularized Support Vector Classifier (SVC), Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and feature engineering techniques to refine and select the most informative features. Our best-performing feature set comprised 11 biomarkers, including 9 metabolites (SM(OH) C22:2, SM C18:0, C0, C3OH, C14:2OH, C16:2OH, LysoPC a C18:1, PC aa C36:0 and Asparagine), a metabolite ratio (Kynurenine-to-Tryptophan), and 1 demographic variable (Age), achieving an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 98%. These results demonstrate the potential for a robust, cost-effective, and non-invasive breast cancer screening and diagnostic tool, offering significant clinical value for early detection and personalized patient management.

King Cobra, the world's longest venomous snake, found across several countries in South and South East Asia are not one species, but four different linages, according to a path-breaking study by wildlife biologist P Gowri Shanker and his team.

Mangroves are considered an important ecosystem as they are host to both marine and freshwater animals.

At Maddur, India’s biggest market for tender coconut, average wholesale prices are hovering between Rs 38 and Rs 50 per piece in the last three months.

Hubballi: Only nine of the 63 taluks that were created in Karnataka between 2017 and 2020 have their own administrative building, an unfortunate