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 …
MEDICAL wisdom has it that parasites evolve to become less harmful to their hosts. For if they became more virulent and killed off their hosts, they would be terminating their own lives, too. But, a recently published 10-year field study of the relationship between Panama's fig wasps and roundworms that …
DESIGNER science is coming of age. Scientists are combining the growing understanding of processes and structures at the molecular, atomic and subatomic levels with computer modelling techniques to synthesise new products. And, they are now discovering that their theoretical simulations are borne out by reality. Scientists hitherto used trial-and-error methods …
DESPITE its travails, pregnancy is commonly perceived as a delicate give-and-take between a woman and the embryo she carries. But now David Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University in Boston, challenges this view by suggesting that conception is a long evolutionary struggle between the mother and the foetus. Says …
ASPIRIN -- the world's most popular pain-killer -- if consumed regularly, may reduce the risk of cancer of the digestive system, suggests a study undertaken by Michael J Thun and his team from the American Cancer Society and the Emory University School of Public Health in Atlanta. They found a …
Paralysing geneUS SCIENTISTS have homed in on a gene defect linked to a debilitating nerve disorder known as Lou Gehrig's disease (Cambridge University Alumni Magazine). The disease, a celebrated victim of which is physicist Stephen Hawking, the author of A Brief History of Time, gradually paralyses its victims by killing …
THOSE who wax lyrical about the superior sound quality of compact discs over records or vice versa, do so merely for the sake of argument, conclude German music psychologists who found that only one out of 40 persons could distinguish between sounds from the two (New Scientist Vol 139, No …
SAVE WILD peanuts, enrich your soil. That's the latest slogan being drummed out by agronomists across the world. They have found that wild peanuts, most of which come from South America, are well adapted to the poor acid soils of the tropics and prevent erosion because they tenaciously cling on …
NEXT TIME you buy an Ayurvedic medicine, don't forget to read the list of ingredients used. For all you know, it might be an allopathic preparation being passed off as Ayurvedic medicine. N A Kshirsagar of King Edward Memorial Hospital in Bombay recently found that a mixture of aspirin and …
AFTER three decades of dogged research, biologists have discovered how the sea urchin, a relative of the starfish, mates. They now hope this will help them solve some fundamental problems in developmental and evolutionary biology. The sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus), like its other marine cousins, jettisons its eggs into the …
HOUSEHOLD electrical appliances may be convenient, but exposure to the electromagnetic fields (EMFs) they generate may not be safe. In fact, such EMFs and those generated by power transmission lines, radars and satellite equipment can even cause cancer, say scientists citing experimental results. But other scientists are not convinced and …
ANTS ARE known for their industriousness, but not many people know about their ability to figure out the shortest path between two points -- that is, along a straight line -- without having a bird's eye view of their surroundings. How ants follow a straight path to their food has …
HUGE DEPOSITS of iron found in different parts of the world has puzzled geologists because oxygen, which is an important constituent of iron ore, was scarce when they were formed about 3.5 to 1.8 billion years ago. Now, F Widell and his colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Marine …
THE PASSAGE of genes from one generation to another is a matter of chance. A given gene from a parent has a 50 per cent chance of turning up in the offspring, said Gregor John Mendel, often called the father of genetics. But now a Russian team, headed by Sergei …
MALE HOMOSEXUALITY seems to run in the family and the trait is passed on by the mother, according to US researchers. Dean Hamer and his colleagues at the US National Cancer Institute interviewed 76 homosexuals and found 13.5 per cent of the brothers of these gay men were homosexual too. …
SLOW AND steady wins the race, goes the moral of one of the most popular of Aesop's fables in which an arrogant hare loses a race to a persevering tortoise. But, two US brain researchers say if the race had taken place at twilight instead of during the day, as …
SCIENTISTS claim to have unveiled through a DNA analysis the mystery about the fate of Czar Nicholas II and his family in the wake of the Russian Revolution. A team of British and Russian forensic experts matched the DNA from blood samples provided by three living relatives of the Czar's …
SHAKESPEARE was wrong when he described Julius Caesar as "constant as the northern star", because the brightness of the North Star is variable, changing by a few per cent every four days. But the Bard will be right next year when the star's brightness will become constant, predict astronomers (New …
A FAT-RICH diet, widely believed to be unhealthy, acts as an elixir for the Japanese, the world's longest-living people, claim old-age researchers. Before World War II, the lifespan of the Japanese was the lowest in the developed world. "Our cholesterol (counts) used to be very low," says Takao Suzuki, director …
DRUG ADDICTION is not a modern age phenomenon for it seems even the ancients knew the pleasures of junkyism, claim scientists (The Lancet, Vol 341, No 8843). Franz Parsche and his colleagues at the Institute for Anthropology and Human Genetics in Munich, Germany, examined hair and tissue samples taken from …
AS SCIENTISTS make smaller and faster computers, somewhere down the road they are bound to run into barriers erected by the laws of physics. For instance, the ability of modern computers to wipe out files puts a limit on their power efficiency because deleting material consumes energy. Therefore, no matter …
