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Showing posts from June, 2020

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Four Beautiful Towns of France & Germany----a photo essay

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Four Lovely neighbours of Heidelberg Four lovely neighbours of Heidelberg A pictorial journey   Wyssembourg, France Wyssembourg is a small town in France. It is on the border with Germany and not far from Heidelberg, Germany's university town. We had taken a train that touched Mannheim and Landau on the way. When the train pulled up at Wyssembourg station, an almost empty platform soaked by drizzles preceding our arrival greeted us. An absolute beauty! Right from there it was a comfortable saunter through a picturesque, pretty, clean and graceful little town. I was so awed that even this potpourri of adjectives is not enough to describe the photogenic French town. A little river Lauter flows through the town. It is so small and so narrow that on first view it gives an impression of a narrow canal flowing through the town. Not far from its larger counterpart Strasbourg, this cute town is rich in history. Born in the seventh century, the town grew up around ...

An Invisible War – Overview on the role of UV-C in fighting COVID-19

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UV-C vs COVID 19 The invisible pathogen COVID 19 has suddenly taken our entire planet by surprise at the beginning of 2020. The invasion was so sudden that even the World Health Organization (WHO) took time to declare this as a pandemic. At a time when the entire world is trying to arrive at plausible solutions to arrest the spread of this rampaging virus, our Lighting fraternity has joined the fight by concentrating more on studies of non-visual impacts of light. An invisible part of the optical radiation spectrum, ultraviolet radiation has more energy than its visible counterpart due to its shorter wavelengths. The ultraviolet spectrum comprises UV-A (400 nm to 315 nm); UV-B (315 nm to 280 nm); UV-C (280 nm to 100 nm) – classification as defined by CIE. Whenever ultraviolet radiation is used for germicidal purposes, it is known as GUV (Germicidal Ultraviolet ) radiation. It has been found to be highly effective in deactivating or killing virus...

Heidelberg

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at a cute little University town in Germany Almost two decades since I first stepped into this romantic little University town in Germany. On an assignment at Nijmegen, Netherlands, I had decided to spend a few days at my brother-in-law’s house in Dreieich – a quiet suburb, around 10 km from Frankfurt International Airport. A museum dedicated to Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, inventor of the first rigid airship ‘Zeppelin’ is in Dreieich, quite close to my brother-in-law's house..  I was excited when my niece Tanya drove me down to Heidelberg, about 100 km from Frankfurt. The main reason being I longed to see the place that boasted of the oldest university in Germany and one of the oldest surviving universities in Europe. The Schloss, a romantic twelfth-century castle. overlooking the university town below, the river Neckar (a tributary of Rhine), and the hills beyond were breathtaking views. Enough to instill a feeling of love at first sight. No wonder Heidelberg is...