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 …
MINI radars are being used in warning systems for cars when they are being reversed and for cruise-control systems to maintain constant distances from other vehicles. Now, Thomas McEwan, an engineer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, has designed miniature radars that, at just $10, are less …
TAXOL, the anti-cancer wonder drug extracted from the leaves and bark of the yew tree, has found another target. Researchers at the University of California School of Medicine say that polycystic kidney diseases (PKD), the most common hereditary kidney disease which accounts for 10 per cent of the patients requiring …
THE ozone layer over the US had thinned to unprecedented and worrisome flimsiness during 1993, say scientists who had monitored sunlight at various ground sites over the year. Between January and April of last year, ozone concentration was 12.6 per cent below normal (New Scientist, Vol 142, No 1927). What …
PLANTS exposed to music grow better, believes French physicist and musician Joel Sternheimer, who has recently applied for a patent covering his unique style of music, which he claims promotes growth in plants. These are not random melodies but compositions based on molecular vibrations that occur during the synthesis of …
COMPUTER has come up with primary evidence suggesting that Shakespeare may, after all, have plagiarised anonymous works often attributed to Christopher Marlowe. UK's Aston University computer scientist Robert Mathews and literary scholar Thomas Merriam made the discovery using what are called neural networks -- a computer programmed to learn from …
WHILE greens have been carping themselves hoarse against the "throwaway" culture, a scientist at the University of Victoria in Canada has calculated that disposable cups -- polystyrene or paper -- may be more ecofriendly after all (Nature, Vol 369, No 6473). Comparing the energy consumed in manufacturing reusable ceramic cups …
WHAT could the consequences be of the rapid extinction of plant and animal species, as witnessed this century? A team of researchers at the Centre for Population Biology, of the UK's Imperial College at Silwood Park says that it has demonstrated experimentally, for the first time, that the loss of …
A FRESH approach has paved the way for small and compact high energy accelerators to propel electrically charged atomic and subatomic particles such as electrons and protons. Chandrashekar Joshi, A Lal and their colleagues from the department of electrical engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles claim that …
WHAT do whales have in common with pigs, deer and hippos? All of them share the same ancestors, say evolutionary biologists. This belief has been held for a long time, but now, two groups of palaeontologists working in Pakistan have discovered fossils that are up to 52-million-year-old to support the …
IT SEEMS the war between antibiotics and bacteria is a never-ending one. Time and again these clever organisms have made the most potent drugs look like placebos. But researchers at the Washington University's School of Medicine in St Louis believe they may have finally nailed the Achilles' heel of bacteria …
FACED with a surplus of milk, US dairy farmers have turned to researchers to put their excess milk to new uses. Two fruits of this unique research pact may soon hit the market -- edible packaging and tidier yoghurt. By playing around with the amino acids of a milk protein …
THE Japanese have come up with a process that makes wood resistant to fire, decay and warping. Earlier attempts at improving one of the 3 attributes invariably worsened at least 1 of the other 2. In the new process developed at the Miyagi Prefectural Institute of Technology, the wood tissue …
SCIENTISTS delving deep into molecular structure, have for the first time now a tool to study single molecules at room temperature (Nature, Vol 369, No 6475). Earlier, scientists using spectroscopy -- a technique by which light bounced off a substance revealing its structure -- could only obtain an average picture …
IF YOU have ever blown soap bubbles as a child, you must have wished that the short-lived, rainbow-coloured spheres were more rugged. Looking at the flimsy soap film one could hardly have imagined that thinner films could be made as hard as diamond. But "thin film" technology has achieved this …
AS IF science isn't perplexing enough to most people, here's a technology that believes not in removing hurdles but putting them up. Fortunately, "hurdle technology" seeks not to confound reason but tries to hamper the growth of bacteria and fungi whose company spoils food and, like other technologies, is aimed …
OVERTURNING traditional theories on the natural production of methane, a major component of natural gas, a team of US researchers now says that metals such as nickel and vanadium present in the sedimentary rocks where natural gas is formed, facilitate methane formation. Till recently, it was widely believed that methane …
A CHINESE herb, Artemisia annua, say scientists, has yielded a wonder drug -- artemether -- which is 3 times more effective than quinine in treating malaria that is resistant to most drugs. They have also found that artemisinin, an oil extracted from the plant, has cut to about 1/5th the …
NEW discoveries in astronomy are sometimes linked to serendipity. It was by chance that astronomer Alexander Wolszczan and his team at the Pennsylvania State University found evidence for what appeared to be the first planetary system outside our solar system. Another 3 years of data on the finding has confirmed …
THERE is a growing interest worldwide in synthetic substitutes for enzymes -- substances produced by living organisms that catalyse or speed up certain chemical reactions in their bodies -- which can save energy required for several industrial processes. Recently researchers J K M Sanders, Mary McPartlin and their colleagues from …
THE AIDS drug zidovudine can retard the transmission of the AIDS-causing human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) from a mother to her foetus, a recent study reveals (Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol 271, No 11). Trials carried out by the US-based National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) show …
