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 …
GERMAN scientists say an understanding of car crashes could help childbirth specialists tell if a woman needs a Caesarean section (International Business Week, No 3327-657). The team of researchers at the Deutschland-based Electronic Data Systems, struck by the similarity of forces that come into play in a car crash and …
SCIENTISTS say the increase in the atmospheric concentration of methane -- a major greenhouse gas -- is fast levelling off (New Scientist, Vol 140, No 1991). Evidence of a halt in methane rise comes from measurements of atmospheric gases made at 26 stations around the world. In the 1970s, the …
IT'S TIME you took your neglected stamp collection seriously, for mail may soon become electronic. The familiar sound of the postman's bicycle bell will be replaced by the beep of the computer and the crackle of telephone lines as electronic mail, or E-mail, transforms communications. Already about 15 million people …
A GROUP of 20 scientists at the National Chemical Laboratory (NCL) in Pune has developed biotechnological tools to study the genetic diversity of rice. Says team leader P K Ranjekar, "We are interested in studying crops of special relevance to India, and so chose to work primarily on rice." In …
THE AKKADIAN empire flourished on the banks of Euphrates in Iraq, from 2300 BC to 2200 BC. Though the reason for its sudden collapse has long puzzled archaeologists, Harvey Weiss and his colleagues at Yale University in USA now say it literally dried up and withered away. The archaeologists base …
DINOSAURS went extinct because the lumbering, gormandising behemoths were unable to adapt to a changing world. The contemporary car -- a fuming, fuel guzzling, latter-day dinosaur -- probably awaits the same fate. With oil getting scarcer and air fouler, it won't be long before today's cars are veered out of …
Elders of the Navajo tribe still recount the legend of how the Bear, a great medicine being (What on earth does this mean?), instructed them to use a forest root for treating parasites, stomach problems and infections. There is now growing scientific evidence that this and other legends are based …
Virtual reality has done it again. It is now possible to watch a filmed "tour" of the Abbey of Cluny in France in all its splendour. The abbey, which was built in the 10th century, was among the largest of its time and destroyed after the French Revolution. It has …
IRKSOME mosquitoes? Forget mosquito repellant mats, grow a geranium instead, and have the odour of citronella waft the annoying creatures away. An Australian company has developed a new plant -- Mozzie Buster -- a cross between an African geranium and citronella grass, which they say is an extremely effective mosquito …
THE WORLD'S first full-scale experiment to clean up municipal sewage with a reactor full of algae has recently started near Nottingham in the UK (New Scientist, Vol 140, No 1893). The reactor or "biocoil" system developed by Stephen Skill at the London-based Biotechna, contains chlorella algae packed into a 5-m-high …
BRAVO! No more burning bottoms. The next time you park your car in the sun, you needn't gingerly test the hot seat before getting in. Thanks to a new aerosol spray, which contains no ozone-destroying CFCs or alcohol, you can instantly cool off sun-baked vehicles, small spaces and even your …
THE INDIAN cotton crop, already attacked by several insects resistant to most insecticides, is now falling prey to a new insect -- the American serpentine leaf-miner. Scientists suspect this new threat, a native of southern USA, entered the country in 1990-91, probably from Kenya or Europe, along with chrysanthemum cuttings. …
Enter the "smart" window: an insulated, multi-pane, electrically-controlled glazing that can be used to control the amount of light coming through and rejecting excess heat, thereby obviating the need for air-conditioning. Though most components of such a window are still laboratory prototypes, a few semi-intelligent glazings have already hit the …
DREAMS are often the crucibles of new ideas. Remember Kekule dreaming up the ringed benzene structure. Margie Profet, too, had one such dream in 1988. She dreamt that menstrual bleeding was a broom that swept away sperm-borne offending microbes from the uterus. Now she has made her dream public, contesting …
THIS YEAR'S Nobel prize -- worth $825,000 -- for physiology and medicine has been awarded jointly to UK's Richard Roberts and USA's Phillip Sharp for their 1977 discovery of "split genes". The discovery took everybody by surprise because till then, the gene had been thought indivisible. The two scientists made …
THE ASIAN muskox was believed to be one of the species that became extinct about 10,000 years along with mammoths and other large mammals, when the Ice age or Pleistocene came to an end. But now, the discovery of a few skulls of the muskox and plaques depicting the animal …
WITH THEIR earlier attempts to conquer malaria having fallen through, researchers are now toying with a novel approach -- altering the mosquito's genetic make-up so that it cannot carry the parasite it now transmits to humans. Exterminating mosquitoes to check the spread of malaria has been the main goal of …
THOUGHT the dodo was a lumbering, fat bird? You might be mistaken, says Andrew Kitchner, curator at the Royal Museum of Scotland, who has discovered that early illustrations of the dodo, which became extinct in the 17th century, reveal a distinctly thin bird, while later drawings showed the more familiar …
Tissue from the gut transplanted into the brain could help repair nerve and brain disorders, and halt the slow degeneration seen in Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, says Geoffrey Burnstock of the University College of London (New Scientist, Vol 139, No 1890). Burnstock's work focusses on the 100 million nerve cells …
DINOSAURS in Stephen Spielberg's Jurassic Park may look authentic, but the sounds they make would not have been uttered by their long-dead ancestors. The best they could do was sound like a foghorn, says Matsumi Suzuki, director of Tokyo's Institute of Sound, who combined the sciences of palaeontology and acoustic …
