Reply by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) in compliance to the National Green Tribunal (NGT) order dated January 21, 2024 in the matter of ‘News item titled “Feeling anxious? Toxic air could be to blame” appearing in Times of India dated 10.10.2023’. NGT had directed CPCB to file a …
A Japanese company, Hitachi, has developed the technology for making pocket-sized camcorders -- video cameras which are becoming essential family items (New Scientist, Vol 143, No 1945). The technology is based on a secret technique to compress data some 100 times, thereby enabling it to be recorded on "flash memory", …
Do you get crabby when the moon waxes? Don't be surprised: scientists at the Goa-based National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) have discovered that even crabs begin to behave differently under the influence of the moon (Indian Journal of Marine Sciences, Vol 23, No 3). During the new and full moon …
Feeding non-infective bacteria to infants may protect them from diarrhoea, a recent study concludes (The Lancet, Vol 344, No 8929). Jose Saavedra and colleagues at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, USA, performed a clinical trial on 55 infants aged 5 to 24 months, who were admitted to …
Researchers at England's University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne have developed efficient fuel cells based on methyl alcohol for use in electric cars (New Scientist, Vol 144, No 1946). To use methyl alcohol as a fuel requires it to be broken down to yield hydrogen, using a catalyst. But the catalyst was problematic …
For creatures that were supposed to have dominated the entire planet, dinosaur fossils have been singularly missing from Africa. But now palaeontologist Paul Sereno from the University of Chicago claims that he has disinterred from Algeria and Niger fossils of several dinosaur species, among them 2 previously unknown -- a …
With the coming of the fibre optics revolution, information can now be transmitted at the speed of light. At the heart of this revolution is a glass or plastic fibre no thicker than a human hair. A fibre optic cable often only as thick as a pencil can carry a …
THE human body has an impressive battery of security guards. Everybody knows about the infection-fighting capabilities of white blood corpuscles. But there are other little known body defenders, such as the heat-shock proteins, that are equally valiant and useful. The heat-shock proteins (HSP) are produced by cells in response to …
AFTER 4 years of hot pursuit, a us biotech company has won the race to isolate the much sought-after breast cancer gene called BRCA I. Close on the heels of this discovery, an international group has reported mapping of another breast cancer gene called BRCA2. Together, the pair probably accounts …
A US ecologist has warned that certain species that seem to be faring well may already be doomed to extinction in the next 100 years or so, even if their remaining habitat is preserved. "Given the habitat destruction already done, we've already incurred a massive 'extinction debt'," says David Tilman …
Scientists at the University of Florida in Gainesville have isolated 2 genes from a bacterium called Oxalobacter rmigenes that may pave the way for removing kidney stones through gene therapy. The genes in question direct the production of enzymes that break down oxalic acid. Left alone, oxalic acid binds with …
Clean-air campaigners can't always pin down the source of a pollutant, by no means an easy task at best. Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a way to solve the problem. They are studying micro-structures in soot that should, in theory, trace each particle's history and …
A British medical team has found evidence linking chronic fatigue to viral illness (The Lancet, Vol 344, No 8926). Anthony David and his colleagues at the Institute' of Psychiatry, London, England, conducted a study of 618 patients with a general practice diagnosis of viral illness. They found that 6 months …
Codan, an Australian company, has developed a device that can revolutionise the quality of FAX communication even in remote areas and under extreme weather conditions. Unlike present FAX machines, which use telephone and satellite communications, Codon's 9001 HF fax and data interface makes use of high frequency radio technology. This …
In arguments concerning weight, the final arbiter is a cylindrical piece of a platinum-iridium alloy kept in an airtight chamber in Sevres, France, which is deemed to weigh exactly I kg. But a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist says that he has a more precise alternative -the mass of an …
Would parents discriminates between their offspring on the basis of their looks? Yes, claim Bruce E Lyon from the University of Toronto and his colleagues, who have found that American coots often prefer to feed those chicks that have a colourful plumage rather than the plainer ones (Nature, Vol 371, …
ON OCTOBFR 16, 1994, musicians in Paris, Bombay, Jakarta and Singapore played the tune, We are the world, in perfect unison, while people in the 4 cities watched them on giant video screens. This was possible thanks to the world's longest optical fibre submarine communication cable that was inaugurated in …
TWO Scandinavian companies are trying to replicate the fruitless toil of Sisyphus, a Greek mythological character who was given the task of pushing uphill a stone that would at once roll down again. The difference will be that the Kvaerner Group, a Norwegian industrial company, and Asea Brown Boveri, a …
Alchemists have succeeded in fashioning the high-tech version of the Philosopher's Stone: they can now make diamond films out of soot and a gas named argon. Chemist Dieter M Gruen's magic recipe: flash light on a mixture of pure soot -- buckyballs, which contain 60 carbon atoms arranged in a …
Visible celestial bodies account only for about 10 per cent of the total mass of the universe. Astronomers scouring the heavens for the remaining invisible "dark matter" may have now spotted some of it in the form of a halo in a faraway spiral galaxy (Science, Vol 265, No 5175). …
Some bats could well be making the belfries they live in. Jae Choe of Harvard University has recently discovered in Panama a bat (Uroderma bilobatum) that constructs sophisticated wigwams in several leafy tiers (BBC Wildlife, Vol 12, No 9). The bats chewed part of the way through the midrib of …
