Order of the National Green Tribunal in the matter of In Re: News Item titled "Nayar river is vanishing - a yatra reveals conservation goes beyond science and policy" appearing in ‘The Down To Earth’ dated 03.06.2025. The original application was registered suo-motu based on the news item titled "Nayar …
IMAGINE this: 2 prisoners are charged with a crime which they allegedly committed together. If neither confesses - that is, they agree to 'cooperate' - each will serve a term, say 1 year. If one honours the pact between the 2 prisoners to cooperate, while the other 'defects', blaming the …
There were no cures for degenerative disorders like Alzheimer's disease. A recent work in the UK offers a way out. A hormone, Interleukin-1 (IL-1), thought to benefit head injuries, is not benign. By administering a receptor antagonistic to IL-1, the neurodegeneration was reduced.
IMAGiNE being asked questions like, "Have you ever had a period of 2 weeks or mdre when you had trouble failing asleep, staying asleep, waking up too early, or sleeping too much?" : similar set of questions pertaining to feelings of hopelessness, depression and worthlessness of life form the Suicidal …
AGONISING biopsies to detect cancer, which bring as much trauma as the following invasive surgery, might become a nightmare of the past if a technology developed by us-based Matritech Inc receives the approval of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The technology works on the basis of at least one …
Natural musk from the musk deer is now being replaced by an artificial variety made by Chinese scientists working on this project since 1976. Musk is an ingredient in 295 Chinese medicines, with the industry using 4,000-5,000 kg every year. The musk deer is an endangered and protected species in …
Ciba-Geigy is marketing a hormone sachet, for women, to cope with menopause, an indication of diminishing oestrogen and ovarian functions. The symptoms are hot flushes and perspiration to osteoporosis. Sealed in air tight sachets - the Estraderm TTS (transclermal thera- peutic system) - the patch is applied to skin below …
IMAGINE brooding over a million-piece jigsaw puzzle with gaping holes in it, many sections in places where they make no sense, and not the dimmest foregleam of the complete picture, and you have the recorded history of human evolution. Pretty pitiable. Faced with the awesome odds of ever exhuming one …
Until recently, prehensile tails came in 2 basic designs: the elephant trunk - just muscles, no bones - and the monkey tail, in which muscles flex a series of bones. But now a us scientist, Kevin Zippel, has discovered a third design in the tail of a lizard called skink …
HOW do you ensure that a cancer drug injected into the bloodstream reaches its target without being mauled by enzymes stalking the blood highway? And how do you pack ever greater information on to ever diminishing silicon wafers without causing a "traffic jam" on the chip? To cope with these …
To understand the complexity of life, biologists are busy deciphering its language, encoded in structures called chromosomes. Two years ago, scientists announced the first-ever map of how the genetic script -- a sequence of chemical molecules that make up the life-giving DNA -- of chromosome III of the yeast Saccharomyces …
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 …
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 …
IN THESE interdisciplinary times, biologists are equally at home with political theory. Garrett Hardin's essays, Life Boat Ethics and The Tragedy of the Commons constitute 2 of the major political manifestos of our time. James Lovelock's notion of Gaia or David Ehrenfeld's The Arrogance of Humanism question the anthropocentrism so …
THE world is a smaller place today; a Disneyland in France and Chinese heavy metal bands no longer raise eyebrows. Yet, vast differences also exist as industrialised countries continue to yoke poorer and newborn nation-states into the rhetoric of free market development and spiralling debts. Is it possible to imagine …
GREEN pigments, scientists believed, were found only in plants. In most animals whose plumage or body parts appear green, the colour is seen not because of pigments but because of the refraction of light through the not-so-opaque scales or feathers. Now, scientists from London's Natural History Museum and Oxford University …
IN THE first occurrence of its kind in a wild species, scientists report that fruit bats males (Dyacopterus spadiceus) occasionally lactate. Till now, this oddity was seen only in humans and domesticated animals (Nature, Vol 367, No 6465). Jennifer A Brunton and Thomas H Kunz of Boston University and their …
I AM not a botanist and being a Bengali with a particular inclination for non-vegetarian food, I almost shared the sentiment, "Grasses are meant for cows." But reading Grass Evolution and Domestication has been an interesting experience. Reading this book, one is made to realise that the "grass family" is …
Life on earth may have started after an asteroid banged into her. Scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California say that an asteroid collided with Earth between 3.6 and 4 billion years ago, thawing her frozen oceans and creating the right conditions for life to begin humming (New …
HOW did humans acquire intelligence? Two competing theories have attracted a lot of attention. One holds that the complex social relations among higher primates provided a key driving force; the other asserts that it was the complexities involved in obtaining food. Recent evidence indicates both pressures may have been equally …
