Vistara will stop giving plastic water bottles on board its flights, in a bid to reduce plastic usage. The airline, which had earlier banned chewing of gutka on its flights, on Wednesday said it “plans
The Delhi University is finally looking beyond its boundaries. In a move bound to bring relief to many, the university is planning to open up its libraries to students from other institutes. The decision, awaiting final approval from the university's academic council, will benefit a number of students studying in other universities, say officials.
The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), it seems, is spending most of its time devising new plans every month to handle parking in the city instead of solving the problem. This time it has more to to add to the further chaos. After parking was decentralised zone-wise few months back to keep a better check on parking mafia, the civic body is again centralising the payment, tendering and collection of parking fees. Remunerative Project Cell (RP)
Beijing: Two Chinese companies
Pretoria: South Africa said on Monday that it will start killing elephants in order to reduce their burgeoning numbers, ending a 13-year ban and possibly setting a precedent for other African nations. Environment minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk said the government was left with no choice but to reintroduce killing elephants "as a last option and under very strict conditions' to reduce environmental degradation and rising conflicts with humans. There will be no "wholesale slaughter,' he told reporters. The announcement follows months of impassioned debate, with some conservationists arguing for elephant killings to protect the ecosystem, and animal welfare groups outraged at the prospect of slaughtering one of the planet's most intelligent and self-aware creatures. South Africa has been hugely successful in protecting its elephant population, once on the verge of extinction in parts of the country. But it has become a victim of its own success. The number of elephants, which have no natural predators other than humans, is growing at a rate of more than 5% a year and is expected to double by 2020. The big white hunter in the 1800s brought Africa's elephants near to extinction. Now South Africa, Namibia and Botswana have booming populations because of conservation efforts, while those of east and west African nations are struggling because of large-scale poaching. AP
A Vast Lake Trapped Under Ice Sheet Drained Into The Sea, Bringing Down Temperatures Paris: Canadian geologists say they can shed light on how a vast lake, trapped under the ice sheet that once smothered much of North America, drained into the sea, an event that cooled Earth's climate for hundreds of years. During the last ice age, the Laurentide Ice Sheet once covered most of Canada and parts of the northern United States with a frozen crust that in some places was three kilometres thick. As the temperature gradually rose some 10,000 years ago, the ice receded, gouging out the hollows that would be called the Great Lakes. Beneath the ice's thinning surface, an extraordinary mass of water built up
Fuel from carbon dioxide could solve the power and pollution problem Imagine thinking out of the box, on steroids. Like, why not have a system where one could effortlessly extract all the emitted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
Ever wondered how many different kinds of winged friends share the city with us? Better still, how many species can one spot in a single day
New York: Astronomers at the University of Sussex claim to have calculated that the Sun will vapourise Earth in about 7.6 billion years unless our planet's orbit is altered. According to them, the Sun's slow expansion will cause the temperature on the surface of the Earth to rise
British scientists in Antarctica have found evidence of glaciers the size of Texas surging towards the ocean, BBC reported. If the trend continues, they say, it could lead to a significant rise in global sea level. The new evidence comes from a group of glaciers in a remote and seldom visited part of west Antarctica. The "rivers of ice' have surged sharply in speed towards the ocean. David Vaughan, of the British Antarctic Survey, explained: "It has been called the weak underbelly of the west Antarctic ice sheet, and the reason for that is that this is the area where the bed beneath the ice sheet dips down steepest towards the interior. "If there is a feedback mechanism to make the ice sheet unstable, it will be most unstable in this region.' There is good reason to be concerned. Satellite measurements have shown that three huge glaciers here have been speeding up for more than a decade. The biggest of the glaciers, the Pine Island Glacier, is causing the most concern. Julian Scott has just returned from there. He told BBC: "This is a very important glacier; it's putting more ice into the sea than any other glacier in Antarctica. "It's a couple of kilometres thick, its 30 km wide and it's moving at 3.5km per year, so it's putting a lot of ice into the ocean.' It is a very remote and inhospitable region. It was visited briefly in 1961 by American scientists but no one had returned until this season when Julian Scott and Rob Bingham and colleagues from the British Antarctic survey spent 97 days camping on the flat, white ice. At times, the temperature got down to minus 30
: Is there a winwin formula to involve private participation in preserving the country's green cover? The environment ministry is contending with a proposal to allow private funding into greening of the government-held reserve forests and in return letting them earn carbon credits. Though at a nascent stage, the discussions could lead to a new format to get private funding into the forestry sector that faces a serious cash-crunch. The discussions in the ministry come after government put an end to a far more controversial move to hand over degraded forest lands to private players
