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 …
MYTH: The only way you can make money out of a forest is by exploiting its biodiversity, cutting and logging the trees. Fact: there is more to the story than just that. And this is a point that the Iwokrama International Rain Forest Programme, the world's largest project in sustainable …
SHORE birds usually find prey by probing until they strike a clam or a crab. Some can even feel vibrations from buried animals with their bills. But now, researchers in the Netherlands have found one specie which takes advantage of the properties of wet sand to find deeply buried, motionless …
DO NOT go by their looks. They may look tattered and torn, but forests that have been plundered by loggers can still retain most of their tree species diversity. Ecologists studying Southeast Asian forests that have been stripped of their most valuable timber say that the regenerating forest canopy will …
THE mid and late-1980s witnessed global tension rise when scientists discovered a hole in the ozone layer of our planet's atmosphere. This, they said, could be dangerous as ozone shields us from the Sun's ultraviolet (UV) radiation that can cause skin cancer. The main culprit responsible for "punching" the hole, …
Watermaster Technologies Ltd., New Zealand is about to test market in selected countries throughout Asia its Airwell 2000 water extractor. It takes water from the atmosphere, purifies it for drinking, chills it, then stores it in a small built-in container that can hold eight litres. The Airwell runs on normal …
Research into the properties of cedar bark might not seem of much interest to an electronics manufacturer like Sanyo Electric. But when Sanyo found that the bacteria teeming in cedar bark promote the decomposition of organic food under the right combinations of heat and moisture, it had an idea-one that …
Synroc International is using a new Australian technique for locking radioactive waste into a ceramic material that can be buried in rock with, it claims, no fear of pollution. The technology has been demonstrated to the House of Lords select committee on science and technology. The committee is expected to …
Engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed an enviornmental monitoring system that can analyse contaminants on the spot. The system, called E-Smart, consists of sensors capable of measuring small amounts of contaminants, such as heavy metals, solvents, petroleum oil and lubricants, that are linked to data management software …
Sunflowers and spinach could be used to clean up spillage of radioactivity from around nuclear plants if an experiment by the British nuclear industry proves successful. British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) is growing dwarf sunflowers, spinach, sugar beet and Indian mustard on an 80-metre-stretch of land contaminated by leaks from the …
Island sheep may help resolve a fierce debate in ecology about population crashes. British researchers are using sheep populations on St Kilda, a remote archipelago off the west coast of Scotland, to check the relative importance of climate and local factors such as the availability of food. Ecologists usually do …
THERE are few things as unpredictable as the weather, right? If there is one field where Murphy's Law is proved correct time and again, it is climatology. Writer Jerome K Jerome's well known book Three Men In A Boat has a witty observation on how, almost always, Mother Nature tends …
THE flow of radioactive waste into the Irish Sea will be rapidly cut, Britain promised recently. But the clean-up will take much longer than what the government has suggested, say expert calculations. At a meeting of the member nations at the Oslo-Paris (OSPAR) convention on marine pollution in the northeast …
GLOBAL warming. The most talked about phenomenon of the new century, merely means that increasing concentration of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and several others are trapping the heat radiated by the Earth, leading to a warmer planet. This can have many unpredictable outcomes, and climate change is …
THE biggest challenge before us as we face the new millennium is not developing better, faster and cheaper technologies, but trying to save whatever now remains of the planet's biodiversity. There are various ways to do this, but before these methods can be adopted, scientists and environmentalists have to identify …
Cleaning up polluted industrial sites may not require billion-rupee government programmes. Instead, scientists suggest, plant a poplar tree. Laboratory-designed hybrids of the fast-growing tree have been found to act like 100- foot straws that suck contamination from soil and ground water. This natural cleanup is inexpensive but takes several years …
The American Department of Energy's Idaho Chemical Processing Plant is home to some of the nastiest radioactive pollutants on earth. Michael Daly and his colleagues at the Uniformed Services University in Maryland and at the University of Minnesota want to turn this site and others into a desirable address for …
Scientists have discovered a methane-munching bacterium that could play a major role in fighting global warming by preventing the greenhouse gas from reaching the atmosphere.A team of international researchers identified the organism in the acidic peat bogs of Western Siberia. The partly decayed, moisture-absorbing plant matter turns methane into energy …
In a twist to the technique used to extract toxic metals from contaminated land, plants have indeed been made to harvest gold from the soil. Researchers at Massey University in New Zealand have provided what they believe is "the first evidence of significant gold uptake by any plant", according to …
Trees that absorb mercury compounds could be the next step in 'bioremediation' - the use of organisms to clean up the mess left by people. In a report in Nature Biotechnology, Clayton L. Rugh and colleagues from the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, bred seedlings of a tree, the yellow …
Scientists have found a way to make plants soak up gold from ore, suggesting a new way of mining the precious metal. This approach, called phytomining, has been demonstrated before for recovering nickel. Scientists have also studied plants for removing pollutants like lead from soil.Researchers said hybrid poplar trees might …
