And they are exacerbated by bad management, says Simon Long AS IT SCOURS the universe for signs of extraterrestrial life, NASA has a motto-cum-mission-statement: “Follow the water”. About 70% of the human
Evidence is accumulating that the immune system works like an ecosystem, in that its component cells compete with one another for survival. This could have important implications for the treatment
The ocean used to seem infinite in its bounty. But now it is suffering from overfishing and pollution. Wherever humanity meets the sea, the sea comes off worse. Two-thirds of the worlds's 5.5 billion
The second stage of green revolution is running into resistance from farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. The first stage, promoting high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice, left Africa's poorer farmers
At last, the El Nino of 1997-98 is returning to its cradle, after scarring Latin America with drought and fire, storm and flood. But it is not over yet, and the fall-out, economic, social and
Once, vaccines were the poor relations of therapeutic drugs. Traditional vaccines, the sort used to combat childhood diseases such as measles, polio are a low-tech, low-cost boon to public health
Gerald Pier, of Harvard Medical School in Boston and his colleagues studied the relationship between salmonella typhi, the bacterium that causes typhoid fever, and the protein which, when faulty,
Fifteen centimetres of rain fell in a week in Guyana. The rains came only days after Guyana had declared its six-month drought, due to El Nino, a national emergency. But its drought troubles are far
The floods of 1966 woke Venice to the realisation that the water that so famously fills the streets of this city could someday drown it. If the climate continues to warm up, the sea may invade Venice
Lawrence Carter, an electrical engineer at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has developed a way of detecting land mines that depends not on what they contain, but on what they do not
Italy is ageing fast; and according to the country's chief statistical body, Italy has the lowest fertility rate in the world. At last count, in 1996, deaths had outpaced births for four years in a
