11 December 2013 Current Affairs
Supreme Court Judgement On Homosexuality
India's Supreme Court on 11 December upheld the constitutional validity of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code making gay sex an offence punishable with upto life imprisonment.A bench of justices G S Singhvi and S J Mukhopadhaya set aside the Delhi High Court's verdict which had in 2009 decriminalised gay sex among consenting adults in private.The Supreme Court bench allowed the appeals filed by various social and religious organisations challenging the Delhi high court verdict on the ground that gay sex is against the cultural and religious values of the country.The Supreme Court ruled that there is no constitutional infirmity in section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, IPC which makes gay sex an offence punishable with upto life imprisonment.With the apex court verdict, the operation of penal provision against gay sex has come into force. The bench stated Parliament is authorised to delete section 377 of IPC but till the time this penal provision is there, the court cannot legalise this kind of sexual relationship.The court passed the order on a batch of petitions of anti-gay right activists and social and religious organisations against the Delhi High Court's verdict decriminalising gay sex.The Delhi High Court had on 2 July 2009 decriminalised gay sex as provided in Section 377 of the IPC and had ruled that sex between two consenting adults in private would not be an offence.
Scientist Created 'Robotic Sperm' To Help With Fertilisation and Drug Delivery
Scientists have created the first ever “sperm-based biobots” by trapping single sperm cells inside metal nanotubes and remotely controlling their direction using magnets.The resulting biobot (a ‘biological robot’, referring to a bacterium or cell which has been programmed to behave in a certain way) could be put to a range of uses, including delivering drugs to a specific target in the body or fertilising an egg.The experiments have been led by Oliver Schmidt at the Institute for Integrative Nanosciences in Dresden, Germany. Schmidt and his team created magnetic nanotubes 50 microns long by 5 to 8 microns in diameter and dropped these into a fluid containing bull sperm.