A woman walks past a poster of Reliance Industries installed outside the venue of the company's annual general meeting in Mumbai June 7, 2012.

NEW DELHI | Mon Feb 18, 2013 4:55am EST

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India will allow wireless broadband airwave holders to provide voice services if they pay an additional $306 million, a senior government official said on Monday, a move likely to boost billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries Ltd.

Reliance Industries, controlled by India's richest man, is the only company with nationwide fourth-generation (4G) broadband airwaves. The company re-entered the fiercely competitive sector by buying airwaves in a 2010 auction and has so far invested at least $3.5 billion.

Firms which own the broadband wireless access (BWA) airwaves can provide voice services along with high-speed Internet if they pay a fee of 16.58 billion rupees ($306 million), R. Chandrashekhar, the top bureaucrat at the telecommunications ministry, told reporters.

"There is no restriction on the technology that is being used (to provide voice services)," he said.

A move by Reliance Industries, which is still preparing to launch high-speed 4G Internet services, into the voice market would intensify competition and hurt rivals such as Bharti Airtel Ltd and the Indian unit of Vodafone Group Plc.

Reliance Industries shares extended gains to as much as 1 percent after the news, while shares in Bharti Airtel, the country's top telecommunications carrier, were down nearly 1 percent at 4.20 a.m. ET.

The Telecom Commission, the highest decision-making body within the ministry, approved the move on Monday, but it must to be formally signed off by the Telecommunications Minister, Chandrashekhar said.

Voice accounts for almost 85 percent of Indian carriers' revenues, while data is still at a nascent stage. Data services contribute just about 5-6 percent of the total mobile services revenues as fewer people browse the Internet on phones.

Reliance Industries was not immediately available for a comment.

Separately, the Telecom Commission deferred a plan to bring tower companies under the Unified Licensing regime, which is positive for companies such as Bharti Infratel Ltd.

If brought under the regime, the tower companies would have to pay an annual license fee of 8 percent of their revenue and would be required to cut foreign shareholding to 74 percent.

Currently the companies pay no license fee and a foreign shareholder can own as much as 100 percent of their equity.

($1 = 54.2 Indian rupees)

(Writing by Aradhana Aravindan; Editing by Daniel Magnowski)

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ORLANDO, Florida | Wed Jan 30, 2013 10:35am EST

ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) - Americans may be turning away from the hard sciences at universities, but they are increasingly showing up at "science cafes" in local bars and restaurants to listen to scientific talks over a drink or a meal.

Want a beer with that biology? Or perhaps a burger with the works to complement the theory of everything?

Science cafes have sprouted in almost every state including a tapas restaurant near downtown Orlando where Sean Walsh, 27, a graphic designer, describes himself and his friends as some of the laymen in the crowd.

"We just want to learn and whatever we take in, we take in. But we're also socializing and having a nice time," said Walsh, who a drank beer, ate Tater Tots and learned a little about asteroids and radiation at two recent events.

Others in the crowd come with scientific credentials to hear particular scientists lecture on a narrowly focused field of interest.

But the typical participant brings at least some college-level education or at least a lively curiosity, said Edward Haddad, executive director of the Florida Academy of Sciences, which helped start up Orlando's original cafe and organizes the events.

"You're going to engage the (National Public Radio) crowd very easily here," said Linda Walters, a marine conservation biologist from the University of Central Florida who has lectured twice at the Orlando-area science cafes.

Haddad said the current national push to increase the number of U.S. graduates in science, technology, engineering and math, or the STEM fields, is driving up the number of science cafes.

In Orlando, an Orange County STEM Council consisting of business, government and educational leaders recently asked Haddad to help two interested parties launch new science cafes in the downtown library and in a large new town development.

The U.S. science cafe movement grew out of Cafe Scientifique in the United Kingdom. The first Cafe Scientifique popped up in Leeds in 1998 as a regularly scheduled event where all interested parties could participate in informal forums about the latest in science and technology.

Traditionally held in pubs and restaurants, the Cafe Scientifique would start as a short lecture, followed by a short break to re-fill glasses, and then an open discussion, according to the organization's website.

The American movement of independent cafes is loosely organized at the sciencecafe.org website created by public broadcaster WGBH's NOVA science program. Haddad said NOVA several years ago provided a few hundred dollars of seed money to groups around the country that wanted to start a cafe.

However, anyone with a venue, a speaker and a marketing plan can start one. On the sciencecafe.org website, an interactive map shows the location of cafes across the United States and around the globe from Islamabad, Pakistan, to Antwerp, Belgium, to the Hawaiian islands.

Some cafes have cropped up in bookstores, theaters and high school campuses.

In Viera, Florida, about 60 mostly retirees regularly pack a pizzeria to hear speakers from the well-regarded Brevard Zoo or NASA's nearby Kennedy Space Center. In Daytona Beach, scientists from the internationally known Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University draw standing-room-only crowds at a local coffee shop.

Haddad said his hope for the cafes is to engage the public and generate excitement about the STEM fields that might filter down to the next generation.

"My feeling is STEM begins at home, with students who are being brought up by parents or relatives who have some interest in science and may encourage them to do that," Haddad said.

Attending a cafe does not guarantee a speaker as engaging as the popular host of television programs Bill Nye the Science Guy, as Walsh learned when he got lost in the extensive jargon of one lecture.

"I don't know that every scientist is gifted with the ability to work a crowd as well as deliver a lecture on targeted radiation therapy for tumors," said Walsh. "If you can find one that hits both those things, they should have their own television show."

(Editing by Kevin Gray and Kenneth Barry)

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HONG KONG | Fri Dec 21, 2012 4:42am EST

HONG KONG (Reuters) - The bat, a reservoir for viruses like Ebola, SARS and Nipah, has for decades stumped scientists trying to figure out how it is immune to many deadly bugs but a recent study into its genes may finally shed some light, scientists said on Friday.

Studying the DNA of two distant bat species, the scientists discovered how genes dealing with the bats' immune system had undergone the most rapid change.

This may explain why they are relatively free of disease and live exceptionally long lives compared with other mammals of similar size, such as the rat, said Professor Lin-Fa Wang, an infectious disease expert at the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore who led the multi-centre study.

"We are not saying bats never get sick or never get infections. What we are saying is they handle infections a lot better," Wang said in a telephone interview.

What was missing from both species of bats was a gene segment known to trigger extreme, and potentially fatal, immune reactions to infections, called the cytokine storm.

Cytokine storms end up killing not only offending viruses in the body, but the host's own cells and tissues too.

"Viruses rarely kill the host. The killing comes from the host's immune response. So it looks like what bats are doing is depress the inflammation (cytokine storm). If we can learn that, we can design drugs to minimize the inflammation damage and control viral infection," Wang said.

The study, which saw the participation of researchers from China, Denmark, Australia and the United States, was published on Friday in the journal Science.

Compared with other mammals of similar size, bats live a long time, with lifespans of between 20 and 40 years. Rats live between 2 and 3 years, on average.

IMMUNE GENES LINKED TO FLIGHT

Interestingly, Wang and his colleagues found that the highly evolved genes that give bats their superior immune system also enable them to fly.

Out of more than 5,000 types of mammals on the planet, bats are the only one capable of sustained flight and some species can fly more than 1,000 km in a single night.

Such intense physical exertion is known to produce toxic "free radicals" that cause tissue damage and it is these same genes that give the bat the ability to repair itself, Wang said.

"What we found was the genes that evolved fastest were genes involved in repairing DNA damage. That makes sense ... because when you fly, metabolism goes up and it generates free radicals that are toxic to cells," Wang said.

"Because bats fly, they (would have had) to evolve and adapt ... to get genes that can repair DNA damage."

Wang said we have much to learn from the bat, which has evolved to avoid disease and live exceptionally long lives.

"Cancer, ageing and infectious disease, these are the three major areas of concern for people," he said.

"We have studied rats for 150 years to understand how to do better in these three areas. Now we have a system, the bat, that has done very well in evolution. We can learn from the bat. With modern techniques, we can design new drugs to slow down the ageing process, treat cancer, fight infections."

(Editing by Robert Birsel)

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