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This study examined the thrombolytic potential of black tea [Camellia sinensis (L) O. Kuntze.] in vitro, using Sri Lankan high grown Dust grade No: 1 black tea and goat blood. Different concentrations of tea were made in isotonic saline (2.5, 5, 10 and 20 mg/mL) and added to preclotted blood and the clot lysis activity was determined (in terms of weight and expressed as % of lysis) following 90 minute incubation at 37 o C. The results showed that tea induced mild to moderate (121-520%) and significant (p < 0.05) clot lysis activity. This effect was dose-related. However, the clot lytic activity of black tea was markedly lower than streptokinase (0.1 mg/mL). It is concluded that Sri Lankan black tea possesses fast acting mild to moderate thrombolytic activity in vitro when tested on goat blood.

The aim of this study was to demonstrate the potential effects of black tea brew of Camellia sinensis using Sri Lankan high grown dust grade no. 1 tea on pregnancy outcome of rats when exposed during early (days 1-7), mid (days 8-14) and late (days 15-21) pregnancy of rats. Different doses of black tea brew (mg/ml/day) was orally administered daily during this period to separate groups of rats (n ¼ 6/group): 84 (equivalent to 1.5 cups), 167 (3 cups), 501 (9 cups), and 1336 (24 cups). The results showed that black tea brew did not significantly (P > 0.05) change the pregnancy outcome (in terms of quantal pregnancy, number of uterine implants, number of viable implants, implantation index, pre-implantation loss, post-implantation loss, gestation index, number of pups born, litter index, live birth index and viability index) and pre-(in terms of length of the implants/foetus, gestation length, cranial length, cranial diameter and tail length of pups) and postnatal (in terms of time taken to open eyes, eruption of incisors and appearance of fur) development. Furthermore, black tea brew did not induce gross morphological birth abnormalities. If the results are applicable to women, it is concluded that even heavy consumption of black tea brew during pregnancy may not be harmful for pregnancy outcome.

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Human-elephant conflict (HEC) takes hundreds of human and elephant lives, every year. Though there are many techniques and systems deployed in African and Asian countries to mitigate this conflict, none of them have provided efficient solutions. The success of a modern HEC mitigating system heavily depends on its capability to detect the presence of an elephant. In most of the existing systems, their superior accuracy of detecting an elephant's presence is limited by certain conditions such as the ability to capture a good quality image containing the elephant. In this paper, we propose an alternative elephant detection system which uses odour of elephant urine and the earflap sound as detection parameters and also a support vector classification for decision making. The proposed system can produce higher accuracies in detecting wild elephants present in a 35m radius, under all conditions. Thus, the proposed system is much more superior over the existing elephant detection systems and will be an effective tool to mitigate the HEC.