Microfinance Monitor NEWS WITH GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

Beseiged with CBI raids at his home in Delhi and Dehradun, NDTV founder Prannoy Roy on Friday castigated the case as “ridiculous and a concocted set of facts” and asserted that he and his wife “never touched black money and never bribed even a single person.” Speaking at the Press Club of India on Friday, Prannoy Roy vowed to fight ...

The world’s passenger aircraft fleet above 100 seats is set to more than double in the next 20 years to over 40,000 planes as traffic is set to grow at 4.4 percent per year, according to Airbus’ latest Global Market Forecast 2017-2036. Over this period, increasing numbers of first time flyers, rising disposable income spent on air travel, expanding tourism, ...

A new study, published in the journal Social Science and Medicine, has shown that selling rewards programs to participants entering a weight loss program is a low cost strategy to increase both the magnitude and duration of weight loss. A team from the Duke-NUS Medical School (Duke-NUS) and Singapore General Hospital (SGH) led the research, which has implications for insurance ...

An open-source software tool called Mendel,MD could help doctors analyze patients’ genetic data in order to diagnose diseases caused by mutations. Developed by Raony Cardenas and colleagues at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil, the tool is presented in a new study in PLOS Computational Biology. Diseases caused by genetic mutations can be challenging to diagnose. Sequencing of a patient’s ...

  Astronomers have used the sharp vision of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to repeat a century-old test of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The Hubble team measured the mass of a white dwarf, the burned-out remnant of a normal star, by seeing how much it deflects the light from a background star. This observation represents the first time Hubble has ...

A South Korean study, affiliated with UNIST has introduced a method for the remote detection of hazardous radioactive substances. With the help of this newly-developed detection device, the detection of various types of radioactive materials in far flung North Korean geographies will be possible now. In their study, published in the May issue of the prestigious journal, Nature Communications, Professor ...

Whether India reaches full literacy by 2021 or not may be a big question but certainly the Internet will penetrate almost two-thirds of its population, according to a Cisco report. Currently, India’s internet users are about 373 million (28% of population) and expected to reach 829 million(82.9 crore) or 59% by 2021, said the global networking giant on Friday. In ...

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) has made a third detection of gravitational waves, ripples in space and time, demonstrating that a new window in astronomy has been firmly opened. As was the case with the first two detections, the waves were generated when two black holes collided to form a larger black hole. The newfound black hole formed by ...

Japan’s Upper House passed the special bill on Friday, paving the way for Emperor Akihito to step down and pass the throne to his eldest son, Crown Prince Naruhito, a week after the bill was passed by the lower house. Once regarded divine power, the oldest monarchy of Japan will undergo another major change with the passage of the Special ...

Finally Cambridge researchers have found the reason why many men do not say ‘I love you’ but end up in the company of beloved ones because women have it in the DNA to read the mind of men and others just by looking at their eyes. In a first of its kind study, researchers at the University of Cambridge developed ...