American astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake devised his namesake equation in the early 1960s.

The 31-year-old Backus — who lives on a narrow boat in central London — is not even that particular about his ideal match, requiring only that she be a London-based female, aged 24-34, with a university education.

“I am not trying to be an elitist or anything,” he said about his educational requirements. “Everyone has preferences. I just think we would have more in common.”

Further reducing his chances, he has estimated he would be physically attracted to just five percent of the women meeting all these criteria.

This means there are about 10,500 women in Britain who tick all the boxes for Backus, he said — just above the 10,000 potential communicative civilizations that could exist in the Milky Way according to the Drake equation.

So just 0.14 percent of Londoners and 0.017 percent of the British population meet Backus’s own requirements, he said.

But a relationship takes two.

If this economist’s dream women are equally as fussy as he is, his chances of finding someone who will return his affections plummets to just 0.00034 percent, he said.

“There are 26 women in the UK with whom I might have a wonderful relationship. So, on a given night out in London there is a 0.00034 percent chance of meeting one of these special people,” he said.

“That’s a 1 in 285,000 chance. Not great.”

But love can still defy the odds right on your doorstep. Since writing his paper on the equations of finding love, Backus has started dating his neighbor Rose. She meets his age requirement, has a university degree and also lives on a boat.

Disinfectants are the first line of defense against the spread of hospital-acquired infections and effective cleaning of surgical instruments is vital to beating them.

The German formula works against a wide range of germs, including some that survive ordinary disinfectants, such as Mycobacterium avium bacteria which can cause a tuberculosis-type illness and enteroviruses that may cause polio.

Drug-resistant bacteria, the so-called “superbugs,” are a growing problem in hospitals worldwide and poor hygiene among staff is often blamed for the spread of such infections. They kill about 25,000 people a year in Europe and about 19,000 in the United States.

In previous studies, the German team found a simple alkaline detergent that could eradicate prions — disease-causing proteins that are particularly hard to get rid of because they can become fixed onto surfaces through the use of some conventional disinfectants.

In their new study, Michael Beekes and Martin Mielke from the Institute’s hygiene department mixed the alkaline with varying amounts of alcohol and tested its ability to rid surgical instruments of bacteria, viruses and fungi and prions. They found that a mixture with 20 percent alcohol was best.

Beekes said he thought the new disinfectant could have a huge impact on hospital safety protocols.

“Standard formulations that eliminate prions are very corrosive,” he said in the study published in the Journal of General Virology.

“The solution we’ve come up with is not only safer and more material-friendly, but easy to prepare, cheap and highly effective against a wide variety of infectious agents.”

A Dutch study published last week found that the methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) superbug, which can cause blood poisoning, spreads not freely but in clusters, suggesting it is spread through healthcare systems by patients being repeatedly admitted to different hospitals.

The material contains cobalt atoms arranged in long chains and each atom acts like a tiny bar magnet that can point either ‘up’ or ‘down’.

When a magnetic field is applied at right angles to the aligned spin directions, the spins can ‘quantum tunnel’ between the ‘up’ and ‘down’ orientations. At a precise value of the applied field these fluctuations ‘melt’ the ferromagnetic order of the material resulting in a ‘quantum critical’ state.

‘You might expect to see random fluctuations of the spins at this critical point but what we uncovered was a remarkable structure in the resonances of the magnetic spins indicating a perfectly harmonious state,’ said Radu Coldea from Oxford University’s Department of Physics who led the team.

As the critical state was approached the researchers observed that the chain of atoms behaved like a ‘magnetic guitar string’.

Radu added: ‘The tension comes from the interaction between spins causing them to magnetically resonate. We found a series of resonant modes. Close to the critical field the two lowest resonant frequencies approached closely the golden ratio 1.618…, a characteristic signature of the predicted E8 symmetry.’

He is convinced that this is no coincidence and it reflects a subtle form of order present in the quantum system.

The resonant states seen experimentally in cobalt niobate may be our first glimpse of complex symmetries that can occur in the quantum world. “The results suggest that similar ‘hidden’ symmetries may also govern the physics of other materials near quantum critical points where electrons organize themselves according to quantum rules for strong interactions,’ Radu told us.

The research was supported by EPSRC and Radu aims to use a new EPSRC grant to explore the physics of materials near quantum criticality.

The team included Dr Radu Coldea, Dr Elisa Wheeler and Dr D Prabhakaran from Oxford University’s Department of Physics, as well as researchers from Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin, ISIS Rutherford Laboratory, and Bristol University.

“Here is a bacterium that we know is sometimes harmful and that is clearly associated with cancer,” Solnick said. “But it’s not that simple.”

Solnick explains that up until the 20th century, when public health improved and antibiotic use was widespread, virtually everyone was infected with H. pylori. That remains the case today in most developing countries, implying that H. pylori may have evolved with its human host because it confers some selective benefit.

“These new findings suggest that one such benefit may that H. pylori provides protection against tuberculosis, and perhaps other infectious diseases as well,” he said.

Tuberculosis is second only to HIV as a cause of death due to a single infectious agent; an estimated one third of the world population has latent TB infection. But only 30 percent of people exposed to TB ever become infected, and only 10 percent of those infected will develop active tuberculosis disease.

“One explanation may be the presence of chronic infection of the stomach with H. pylori,” Solnick said. The findings also may eventually aid in managing TB, since H. pylori infection may help determine whether someone infected with TB gets a latent, asymptomatic infection or active disease.

The collaborative research effort began with the hypothesis that a person’s immune responses to individual infections are modified by the existence of other infections, said Sharon Perry, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, and the study’s lead author.

Early studies funded by the National Institutes of Health showed that a patient infected with H. pylori had elevated immune responses to TB antigens. Perry’s work expanded to test the hypothesis in patients from immigrant populations in Santa Clara County, then in households in Gambia and Pakistan, where TB is prevalent. In the two-year study, they found that individuals exposed to TB who then progressed to active disease were less likely to be infected with H. pylori than those who were not infected with H. pylori. Protection against tuberculosis may have been a result of enhanced immune responses to TB antigens in those infected with H. pylori, since H. pylori induces expression of interferon gamma and other cytokines, which are important for immunity against viral and bacterial infections.

At this point, Perry and Stanford University professor Julie Parsonnet wanted to test the theory in non-human primates. They enlisted Solnick at UC Davis, in conjunction with JoAnne Flynn of the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics and Immunology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

With a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Solnick, Parsonnet, and Flynn looked at the role of H. pylori in 41 monkeys challenged with TB. Again, the findings were striking. Of the 30 monkeys that tested positive for H. pylori, only 5 developed active TB, but 6 of 11 monkeys that were negative for H. pylori developed active disease.

“The one-disease, one-pathogen paradigm doesn’t tell the whole story,” said Perry. “It is incomplete as an explanation of the clinical outcomes of chronic infection. In fact, the thousands of organisms that live with us play a role in shaping our immune response to specific infections.”

Solnick cites the “hygiene hypothesis” as one possible explanation. That theory suggests that a reduction in exposure to infectious diseases can make the immune system less able to fight other challenges. Conversely, exposure to certain pathogens may aid immune response to other infections.

The authors acknowledge the findings are preliminary and propose several follow-up studies. First, Solnick, Parsonnet and Flynn have proposed research to test whether experimental infection of H. pylori will protect monkeys from TB, and whether it will enhance the protective effect of immunization. If successful, they will test a recombinant H. pylori strain that expresses TB antigens for possible immunization against TB. These studies will be performed in collaboration with Ondek Ltd, founded by Barry Marshall, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2005 for the discovery of H. pylori.

Researchers will be selected on the basis of research aptitude test conducted by KSCSTE (date will be announced later) followed by personal interview. Candidates must register for Ph. D in the discipline in which they are selected for fellowship.

They must register for Ph. D Programme in any one of the Universities in Kerala, latest by the next admission time in the respective Universities in any case not later than one year after the award. They may carry out the research work either in University Departments, National Institutes or any recognized R & D Centres, which will be called the ‘Institution’. If they are already undertaking the research work, the Head of the Institution will intimate the fact to KSCSTE where they are undertaking research work.

Last date for the receipt of application is 10th November 2009