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The four state banks' default loans spiralled in December 2012, due to the various scams unearthed last year.
The cumulative default loans on December 31, 2012, as per the banks' preliminary data, stood at Tk 21,519 crore, up 126 percent year-on-year.
A central bank inspection drive last year exposed a host of irregularities at state banks -- Sonali, Janata, Agrani, Rupali -- and the loans have now been classified as defaults.
The biggest irregularity was detected at Sonali Bank's Ruposhi Bangla Hotel branch, where Tk 3,547 crore was embezzled by five firms, including Hall-Mark Group, in the name of bill purchase.
The loans were given to the accused parties by giving “acceptance” to bills of different banks and branches of Sonali Bank.
Of the Tk 3,546 crore of default loans the Ruposhi Bangla branch raked up, Tk 2,600 crore has been classified.
Sonali is yet to repay the remaining amount to the banks concerned, but when it is done the amount will also be recorded as defaults.
Sonali's default loans on December 31 stood at Tk 12,050 crore, up 111 percent year-on-year.
“We have taken drastic measures to recover the default loans. Next year, you will see its outcome,” Pradip Kumar Dutta, Sonali Bank's managing director, told The Daily Star.
He cited the recovery made in January alone -- of Tk 632 crore -- which is 74 percent of the total recovery made in the whole of 2012.
“Apart from the irregularities, the new loan classification policy of the central bank also contributed to the increase in default loan figures,” Dutta said.
Similarly in Janata Bank, the default loan sum shot up 168 percent in December, with its share of the outstanding loans increasing 1.5 times.
Agrani's default loans increased year-on-year by 143 percent to Tk 4,663 crore, and Rupali Bank's 113 percent.
“At the end of last year, the boards of the public banks did not function, which might have led to the rise in default loans,” a top official of Janata Bank said, asking not to be named.
Loan sanctioning upon political persuasion, dishonesty of bank officials caused the spike in default loans, said Khondker Ibrahim Khaled, a former deputy governor of Bangladesh Bank.
Khaled, however, disagrees that the change in central bank's loan classification policy had much impact on the final default loan figures.
“It made a very small difference,” he said, adding that the government should issue strict directive to the lawmakers to not pursue loans from public banks, for the sake of bringing down the default loan volumes.
If any irregularity is detected, the finance ministry will have to take stern actions, including on-the-spot dismissal, he said.
Besides, if BB makes any recommendation to the finance ministry regarding the public banks, the ministry would have to take instant action. “The central bank supervision will have to be strengthened further.”

All's Not Lost Extinction rates not so bad

Concerns that many animals are becoming extinct, before scientists even have time to identify them, are greatly overstated, according Griffith University researcher, Professor Nigel Stork. Professor Stork has taken part in an international study, the findings of which have been detailed in "Can we name Earth's species before they go extinct?" published in the journal Science.
Deputy Head of the Griffith School of Environment, Professor Stork said a number of misconceptions have fueled these fears, and there is no evidence that extinction rates are as high as some have feared.
"Surprisingly, few species have gone extinct, to our knowledge. Of course, there will have been some species which have disappeared without being recorded, but not many we think," Professor Stork said.
Professor Stork said part of the problem is that there is an inflated sense of just how many animals exist and therefore how big the task to record them.
"Modern estimates of the number of eukaryotic species have ranged up to 100 million, but we have estimated that there are around 5 million species on the planet (plus or minus 3 million)."
And there are more scientists than ever working on the task. This contrary to a common belief that we are losing taxonomists, the scientists who identify species.
"While this is the case in the developed world where governments are reducing funding, in developing nations the number of taxonomists is actually on the rise.
"World-wide there are now two to three times as many taxonomist describing species as there were 20 years ago."
Even so, Professor Stork says the scale of the global taxonomic challenge is not to be underestimated.

Source: Science Daily

Farm - To - Market Supply technology is key

Less rice is wasted with technological advances

The moder-nisation of farm-to-market supply chains is important for increasing farmers' income, alleviating poverty, cutting food waste and improving the affordability of food staples, according to the authors of a book.
The Quiet Revolution in Staple Food Value Chains: Enter the Dragon, the Elephant, and the Tiger is a joint project by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) that was launched last month.
The book examines the movement of rice and potatoes from the farm to the consumer known as the 'value chain' in three Asian countries: Bangladesh, China and India. Rice and potato are food staples in Asia.
Thomas Reardon, a professor in the Department of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics at Michigan State University, United States, and one of the book's authors, says that the study also has lessons for South-East Asian and Pacific island states.
He says that all three countries have found ways to modernise the value chains of these staple crops. He adds that the changes had been introduced at the grassroots and brought about mainly by mobile phones, the use of improved crop varieties and technological changes related to rice milling and potato storage.
Reardon says the rapid rise of modern cold storage facilities for potatoes, which enable them to be supplied out of season, had led to more stable prices and higher incomes for farmers.
These facilities have also helped cut the amount of food wastage along the supply chain. According to a World Bank study which the authors cited between 30 per cent to 40 per cent of the food costs is due to the food wastage in the supply chain.

Did You Know? What is Pareidolia?

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records when played in reverse.
The word comes from the Greek words para ("beside, alongside, instead") in this context meaning something faulty, wrong, instead of; and the noun eidôlon ("image, form, shape") the diminutive of eidos.

Fractal Dimension Puzzling plumage

A new study found that the complexity of fractal patterns on a bird's chest communicates the animal's fitness to potential mates.
Scientists studied male and female red-legged partridges (Alectoris rufa), which both display complicated black-and-white patterns of plumage on their chests. The size, shape and complexity of these patterns can be quantified by what's known as fractal dimension (FD).
epeating patterns that show the same structure when zoomed in and out. Fractals are found throughout nature, from seashells to mountain ranges to broccoli, and apparently, the plumage of red-legged partridges.
In a new study, scientists found that the healthier a bird is, the more fractal-like its plumage becomes.

Downstream Effects Watering fields boosts rainfall

Farmers in California help make it rain in the American Southwest, a new computer simulation suggests. Water that evaporates from irrigated fields in California's Central Valley travels to the Four Corners region, where it boosts summer rain and increases runoff to the Colorado River, researchers report online January 12 inGeophysical Research Letters.
This climate link may be crucial to the 40 million people who depend on the Colorado River for drinking water. That number could nearly double in the next 50 years at the same time that droughts are projected to become more common in the Southwest. Since the Central Valley's supply of irrigation water faces an uncertain future, it's important to examine how shortfalls in California might affect climate change in the region, says study coauthor Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist at the University of California, Irvine.
“We have to understand these connections better to deal with changes in water availability,” he says.
The Central Valley is one of the world's most productive agricultural regions. More than 50,000 square kilometers of the valley are irrigated, equaling one-sixth of all irrigated land in the United States.
A study in 2011 showed that watering the area's crops cools local temperatures and increases humidity. But the work didn't find any larger climate ties outside the region, because it relied on a regional climate simulwation, which has trouble estimating conditions along the boundaries of a study area, Famiglietti says.
To overcome this problem, Famiglietti and Min-Hui Lo, now at the National Taiwan University in Taipei, simulated global climate over a 90-year period. They added in 350 millimeters of water coming from groundwater and surface reservoirs to the Central Valley between May and October each year. The researchers say that's a realistic amount of irrigation based on published agriculture and climate data.
The simulations revealed that evaporation doubles in the Central Valley when there's irrigation. That water vapor circulates to the Southwest during the summer monsoon season, which naturally brings rain to the area. “The monsoon is like a big campfire burning away over the Southwest,” Famiglietti says. “The irrigation acts as fuel on the fire.” In addition to bringing more water to the atmosphere, the water vapor brings more energy. And it changes the regional circulation, drawing in even more water vapor from the Gulf of Mexico.
Together, these changes intensify the monsoon season, resulting in a 15 percent increase in rainfall in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona and a 28 percent increase in runoff to the Colorado River compared with simulations lacking irrigation. Some of the water returns to California via the All-American Canal, which brings water from the Colorado River to Southern California, the simulation suggests.
“It's a nice first step,” says hydrologist Michael Puma of Columbia University. “And it's a link that we need to investigate quite a bit more.” Many other variables, such as sea surface temperatures, also influence climate in the Southwest. To better estimate the strength of irrigation's effect in the real world, more complex simulations that take these other factors into account are needed, Puma says.
The study also highlights the importance of investigating irrigation's role in climate in other parts of the world, as well as other ways in which people's use of water might have unintended consequences, Famiglietti says.“What we do with water management really has an impact on climate locally, regionally and globally.”

Shy Phantoms Heart of the matter

A golden age for the neutrino is dawning.
A few decades ago, these shy phantoms that flit nearly unfelt through the interstices of the universe seemed mere leftovers in the world of physics.
They outnumber all other particles of matter, whizzing away everywhere many of them arising in droves from nuclear reactors and nucleosynthesis in stars. Their characteristics made them, to be sure, vitally important building blocks in the 1970s and '80s for theorists who put together the standard model of physics, describing how fundamental forces and particles fit together. Yet, for decades, neutrinos seemed nearly incapable of doing a lick of work. They were like clowns pouring from a circus car, entertainment for theorists but without important jobs in keeping the cosmos running smoothly.
It is about time for the neutrino to add gravitas. “When I first learned about it in the early 1950s, the neutrino had an odd role in nuclear physics, like that of a sort of crazy uncle who was not all there,” physicist and science writer Jeremy Bernstein wrote in an essay in the March-April 2012 issue of American Scientist.
When asked how the neutrino stacks up today, he says: “It is a wonderful particle. It played an important role in the early universe. I mean, everything about it is mysterious. But back in the 1950s, nobody even gave a goddamn. Maybe I learned about it, but nobody was studying it.”
While neutrinos have been rising in mystery and thus stature for some time, their most recent big break occurred last March. It stemmed from measurements made deep inside a granite mountain not far from Hong Kong.

'Scarecrow' Gene: Key to efficient crops

With projections of 9.5 billion people by 2050, humankind faces the challenge of feeding modern diets to additional mouths while using the same amounts of water, fertilizer and arable land as today.
Cornell researchers have taken a leap toward meeting those needs by discovering a gene that could lead to new varieties of staple crops with 50 percent higher yields.
The gene, called Scarecrow, is the first discovered to control a special leaf structure, known as Kranz anatomy, which leads to more efficient photosynthesis. Plants photosynthesize using one of two methods: C3, a less efficient, ancient method found in most plants, including wheat and rice; and C4, a more efficient adaptation employed by grasses, maize, sorghum and sugarcane that is better suited to drought, intense sunlight, heat and low nitrogen.
"Researchers have been trying to find the underlying genetics of Kranz anatomy so we can engineer it into C3 crops," said Thomas Slewinski, lead author of a paper that appeared online in November in the journal Plant and Cell Physiology. Slewinski is a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of senior author Robert Turgeon, professor of plant biology in the College of Arts and Sciences.
The finding "provides a clue as to how this whole anatomical key is regulated," said Turgeon. "There's still a lot to be learned, but now the barn door is open and you are going to see people working on this Scarecrow pathway." The promise of transferring C4 mechanisms into C3 plants has been fervently pursued and funded on a global scale for decades, he added.
If C4 photosynthesis is successfully transferred to C3 plants through genetic engineering, farmers could grow wheat and rice in hotter, dryer environments with less fertilizer, while possibly increasing yields by half, the researchers said.
C3 photosynthesis originated at a time in Earth's history when the atmosphere had a high proportion of carbon dioxide. C4 plants have independently evolved from C3 plants some 60 times at different times and places. The C4 adaptation involves Kranz anatomy in the leaves, which includes a layer of special bundle sheath cells surrounding the veins and an outer layer of cells called mesophyll. Bundle sheath cells and mesophyll cells cooperate in a two-step version of photosynthesis, using different kinds of chloroplasts.
By looking closely at plant evolution and anatomy, Slewinski recognized that the bundle sheath cells in leaves of C4 plants were similar to endodermal cells that surrounded vascular tissue in roots and stems.
Slewinski suspected that if C4 leaves shared endodermal genes with roots and stems, the genetics that controlled those cell types may also be shared. Slewinski looked for experimental maize lines with mutant Scarecrow genes, which he knew governed endodermal cells in roots. When the researchers grew those plants, they first identified problems in the roots, then checked for abnormalities in the bundle sheath. They found that the leaves of Scarecrow mutants had abnormal and proliferated bundle sheath cells and irregular veins.
In all plants, an enzyme called RuBisCo facilitates a reaction that captures carbon dioxide from the air, the first step in producing sucrose, the energy-rich product of photosynthesis that powers the plant. But in C3 plants RuBisCo also facilitates a competing reaction with oxygen, creating a byproduct that has to be degraded, at a cost of about 30-40 percent overall efficiency. In C4 plants, carbon dioxide fixation takes place in two stages. The first step occurs in the mesophyll, and the product of this reaction is shuttled to the bundle sheath for the RuBisCo step. The RuBisCo step is very efficient because in the bundle sheath cells, the oxygen concentration is low and the carbon dioxide concentration is high. This eliminates the problem of the competing oxygen reaction, making the plant far more efficient.
The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Source: Science Daily

H&M's profit hit by expansion costs

Swedish clothing retailer H&M posted a 6.6-percent rise in annual net profit on Wednesday but said results had been hit by costs for its long-term investments as well as by currency factors.
The cheap-and-chic fashion giant said its net profit rose to 16.9 billion kronor ($2.7 billion, 2.0 billion euros) in 2012 from 15.8 billion kronor in the previous year, and that it increased its market share despite a difficult operating environment.
Gross sales by the firm, world's number two clothing retailer after the Spanish Zara group, rose by 9.4 percent to 141 billion kronor in the financial year that ended November 30, but net sales measured at constant exchange rates gained only one percent, the company said.
"H&M continues to stand strong in a challenging clothing market which in many countries has been even more challenging in 2012 compared to 2011," chief executive Karl-Johan Persson said in a statement.
In the fourth quarter, net profit fell 1.3 percent to 5.29 billion kronor ($830 million), beating a 5.09 billion kronor consensus estimate compiled by Dow Jones Newswires.
H&M said its expansion moved faster than expected in 2012, with 304 new stores opening their doors, mainly in China and the United States.
It proposed holding the dividend steady at 9.5 kronor per share.
"On the whole, these results are on the weak side," said Soeren Lundtoft Hansen, an analyst at Sydbank.
Investment costs for expanding online and mobile sales, as well as for a new, high end fashion brand for women, were higher than expected, he added.
The new brand, & Other Stories, will open its first stores in the coming months in seven European countries.
The company said it plans to open 325 stores in this financial year, including in Chile and in Indonesia via a franchise.
"This is a positive development at a time when same store sales, in my view, will remain subdued amid continued weak consumer spending and strong competition in H&M's market segment," Lundtoft Hansen said.
The Stockholm-based company currently has 2,800 stores in 48 markets and more than 104,000 employees.

Looming worker shortage threatens China economy

China's demographic time bomb is ticking much louder with the first fall in its labour pool for decades, analysts say, highlighting the risk that the country grows old before it grows rich.
The abundant supply of cheap workers in the world's most populous nation has created unprecedented cost efficiencies that underpinned its blistering economic expansion over the past 35 years, propelling the global economy forward.
But now the inexorable consequences of the one-child policy imposed in the late 1970s are beginning to appear, and threaten to impact its future growth.
China's working-age population, defined as 15-59, fell 3.45 million last year, official data showed earlier this month -- the first decline since 1963, after tens of millions died in a famine caused by the Great Leap Forward.
The immediate effect may be small in a nation of 1.35 billion people, but the cumulative effects will accelerate over the coming decades.
The number of people aged between 15 and 64 will drop by around 40 million between 2014 and 2030, said Wang Guangzhou, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), a government think-tank -- more than Poland's entire population.
"The population is aging so fast that we are running short of time to deal with it," said Li Jun, also of CASS, adding the family planning policy had exacerbated the problem.
China's proportion of over-65-year-olds is projected to double from seven to 14 percent over only 26 years -- a key demographic measure that took the United States 69 years to complete.
"Undoubtedly it will substantially slow down China's potential growth rate," Yao Wei, an economist with Societe Generale in Hong Kong, told AFP.
An ageing population not only means fewer people available to employ and higher labour costs, but investment -- a key driver of China's growth -- will be harder to maintain as families spend their savings on health care, she said.
Chinese authorities maintain that controlling its population growth has been key to increasing its prosperity.
But while China has risen to become the world's second-largest economy, on a per capita basis it still lags far behind the US and other developed countries.
Industrial disputes have become more common in recent years, as workers demand higher pay and better working conditions on the back of growing awareness of their rights and the shortage of skilled staff.
Multinational companies are looking to other developing economies with lower wages for further expansion, with some already moving production bases out of China to rivals such as Indonesia and Vietnam.
In a survey of 514 Japanese manufacturers by the Japan Bank for International Cooperation last year, the number of respondents voting China as the top destination for overseas business fell by more than 10 percentage points on 2011.
Economists said China must look to speed up the transformation of its economic model and move up the value chain.
"The golden period of the manufacturing industry, particularly those depending on exports, has gone," said Yao.
At the same time, she said, the country was woefully underprepared to meet the burden of caring for the elderly.
"The fiscal situation is not prepared and the social security network is not complete," she said.
By around 2060, every three Chinese workers will have to support two people above 60, compared with a ratio of five to one now, according to Li's projections.
It is a crucial challenge for the ruling Communist Party, said Ren Xianfang, a Beijing-based analyst with research firm IHS Global Insight.
"Delivering growth and delivering social security to the general public are the key things for the state to (maintain) its legitimacy."
Analysts said the medical services are increasingly expensive and hard to access, while the country's flagship public pension plans are crippled by problems including insolvency risks, difficulties in expanding coverage and mismanagement.