To save the planet, first save elephants
Wiping out all of Africa’s elephants could accelerate Earth’s climate crisis by allowing 7% more damaging greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, scientists say. But conserving forest elephants may reverse
Wiping out all of Africa’s elephants could accelerate Earth’s climate crisis by allowing 7% more damaging greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, scientists say. But conserving forest elephants may reverse
Scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs are focusing on ways to help the environment. Some of our favorite ideas.
Ug99's symptoms are dark orange pustules on the stems and the leaves. Stems can be completely girdled by the pustules damaging the tissue and preventing grain fill. This can bring in yield losses of up to 70 per cent. The disease is so strong that it can even wipe out fields. If the stem rust arrives early in the growing cycle, losses are higher.
When Edzard Ernst became the UK's first professor of complementary medicine, he was attacked by both alternative therapists and conventional doctors. The doctors have come round, but he is now alternative medicine's public enemy number one after sticking the needle into everything from acupuncture to homeopathy. He insists he is just being a good scientist, but it has been a long journey for someone whose family doctor was a homeopath.
It was supposed to prevent blindness and death from vitamin A deficiency in millions of children. But almost a decade after its invention, golden rice is still stuck in the lab.
Contrary to expectations, a microscopic plant that lives in oceans around the world may thrive in the changing ocean conditions of the coming decades, a team of scientists reported on Thursday. The main threat to many marine organisms is not global warming but ocean acidification, as carbon dioxide from the air dissolves into the water and turns into carbonic acid.
Early diagnosis of a heart attack may now be possible using only a few drops of saliva and a new nano-bio-chip designed by John McDevitt, of the University of Texas. The nano-bio-chip assay, the size of a credit card, could be used to analyse a patient's saliva on board an ambulance, at the dentist's office or at a chemist's shop, helping save lives and prevent damage from cardiac disease.
The international team of climate change scientists that produced an influential series of reports last year will be doing things a little differently in the future. Government delegates to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), meeting in Budapest, Hungary, approved a plan for the 20-year, 100-nation enterprise that would generate more precise and relevant information on climate change-without taking any longer than the current 6-year gap between reports.
Earth Day is a week away, so brace yourself for cuddly, hug-the-planet blubbering from the presidential candidates. John McCain will tell you we must be the "caretakers of creation." Hillary Clinton will talk of recycling and efficient light bulbs. Barack Obama will surely tell us we "cannot afford more of the same timid politics when the future of our planet is at stake."
In his 1992 book How the World Was One, Sir Arthur C Clarke described a dream he once had
David Sands, professor at the Department of Plant Sciences and Plant Pathology, Montana State University, usa, hypothesized that there is a link between rainfall and bacteria in 1982. He didn't