In Brief – October 2019
With hike in penalties and tighter road traffic regulations under the amended Motor Vehicles Act, R Shah, a resident of Vadodara, has stuck his driving licence, registration certificate, insurance papers and other relevant documents on his helmet, lest he forgets them. “Helmet is the first thing I put on before riding my bike. That’s why I pasted all the documents there so that I don’t face any fine,” he says. And a man in Aligarh was spotted wearing a helmet while driving a car, for he was fined for not wearing one while he was riding a four wheeler!
No more sweating it out now, for you can wear an air-conditioned T-shirt. A Sony-affiliated startup has launched a Bluetooth device called Reon Pocket, designed to be worn with a special silicon material T-shirt that has a pocket on the back, just below the neck, that holds it in place. Controlled through an app, the device can cool its wearer down by 13 deg C, or on colder days, increase the temperature by 8 deg C. It has a battery life of 90 minutes and takes two hours to get charged. The device is presently available in Japan for $120.
Alexis Brett (39) in Britain finally delivered a girl child after giving birth to 10 sons in a row. She had almost resigned herself to living in an all-male household and was delighted when she gave birth to her 11th child. Cameron is now the kid-sister for the boys aged 7 to 17 who, according to Alexis, are much better behaved around her. The couple is not planning any more children.
When news of eighty-year-old Kamalathal selling idlis for a rupee in Coimbatore went viral on social media, offers of help poured in for her. Taking note of her cooking the idlis on a firewood burner, industrialist Anand Mahindra tweeted, “If anyone knows her I’d be happy to ‘invest’ in her business & buy her an LPG fueled stove.” Soon both HPCL and BPCL came forward to offer LPG connection to the octogenarian. “Salute the spirit and commitment of Kamalathal. Glad to have helped her through local OMC officers in getting LPG connection,” tweeted Union Minister for Petroleum
and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan.
All of us are familiar with a childhood threat that when you bump your head against a wall you’d grow horns. And a highly egoistic person is often described as having two horns. But Shyam Lal Yadav, a farmer in Madhya Pradesh, did grow a four-inch horn on his head after he bumped his head in 2014. He was regularly getting the growth shaved by a barber until he recently got it surgically removed by neurosurgeons at the Bhagyoday Tirth Hospital in Sagar. The doctors refer to this rare growth as a ‘sebaceous horn’ or a ‘devil’s horn’.
