Setting up of CPCs in Govt schools expedited

by Ananda KANNANGARA

The National Child Protection Authority (NCPA) has expedited the establishment of Child Protection Committees (CPC) in Government schools.

NCPA, Chairperson, Anoma Dissanayake told the Junior Observer that these committees will teach young children of both gender how to avoid various forms of harassment faced by children and to stop sexual abuse.

Mrs. Dissanayake also said such committees will be set up in private schools too considering it as a national need.

The objective of establishing such committees in all 9700 public schools in the country is to create an awareness of the rights and responsibilities of students, among parents and teachers.Under the programme children will learn how to behave in society without getting into situation that could be harmful to them.

She said, most children face domestic violence which badly affects their educational activities."If elders take precautionary measures to protect children, considering that they are the leaders of tomorrow's society, any form of violence on children could be easily eliminated," she said.

She stressed that all children have the right to receive education at school and therefore it is the responsibility of everybody to inform the NCPA about any non-school going children who are employed as domestics in houses, hotels, restaurants and any other sector.

She also focused special attention on incidents of child abuse that are being reported from all parts of the country very often and said that during the year 2010, over 1000 such cases were reported and stern action were taken against those responsible.

"Our objective is to bring down this number to zero". Speaking further on the setting up of Child Protection Committees in Government schools, Mrs. Dissanayake said such committees will be an ideal platform for children to find solutions to their day-to-day problems as these committees will educate children about what is right and wrong.

According to the NCPA, each committee comprises teachers, principals, parents and students.

A senior NCPA official said the appointment of the first child protection committee took place at Ananda Balika Vidyalaya, Kotte recently amids a large gathering of parents, teachers and students were present. All of them highly valued the invaluable service rendered by the NCPA to curb child abuse in the country.

A gift of green anacondas

The National Zoological Garden of Sri Lanka has gifted two male and two female green anacondas to the Kankaria Zoo in Ahamedabad.Two of the gigantic anacondas are said to be four feet long and the other two about three and a half feet in length. All the anacondas are three years old.

The anacondas that were sent along with enclosures and thermometres to constantly monitor the temperature were initially kept in quarantine to help them get used to their new environment.

The Superintendent of the Kankaria Zoo in Ahamedabad, Dr.R.K.Sahu said that the anacondas were the biggest gift the zoo had received during the past 22 years." They will attract many visitors to the zoo as people were eager to see more animals from other countries."

He said that the anacondas would be of great importance especially to school children as they have so far seen green anacondas, one of the world's largest snakes only in pictures.

The green anaconda can grow to about 29-30 feet and weigh as much as 227kilograms. The females are significantly larger than the males.

The Kankaria Zoo also known as the Kamala Nehru Zoological Garden is situated on the banks of the Kankaria Lake and serves as a natural habitat for a variety of reptiles and mammals.

3-D printer used to make bone-like material

It looks like bone. It feels like bone. For the most part, it acts like bone. And it came off an inkjet printer.

Washington State University researchers have used a 3-D printer to create a bone-like material and structure that can be used in orthopedic procedures, dental work and to deliver medicine for treating osteoporosis. Paired with actual bone, it acts as a scaffold for new bone to grow on and ultimately dissolves with no apparent ill effects.

The authors report on successful in vitro tests in the journal Dental Materials and say they're already seeing promising results with in vivo tests on rats and rabbits. It's possible that doctors will be able to custom order replacement bone tissue in a few years, said Susmita Bose, co-author and professor in WSU's School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering.

"If a doctor has a CT scan of a defect, we can convert it to a CAD file and make the scaffold according to the defect," Bose said.The material grows out of a four-year interdisciplinary effort involving chemistry, materials science, biology and manufacturing. A main finding of the paper is that the addition of silicon and zinc more than doubled the strength of the main material, calcium phosphate.

The researchers -- who include mechanical and materials engineering Professor Amit Bandyopadhyay, doctoral student Gary Fielding and research assistant Solaiman Tarafder -- also spent a year optimising a commercially available ProMetal 3-D printer designed to make metal objects.The printer works by having an inkjet spray, a plastic binder over a bed of powder in layers of 20 microns, about half the width of a human hair. Following a computer's directions, it creates a channeled cylinder the size of a pencil eraser.

After just a week in a medium with immature human bone cells, the scaffold was supporting a network of new bone cells. The research was funded with a 1.5 million dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health.

- Science Daily