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 …
The Mumbai-based Research and Development entitites have developed a new systemn to check air pollution caused by the textile industry. The Bombay Textile Research Association and the Petroleum Conservation Research Association have jointly set up a plant at Domvili in Thane in Maharashtra to demonstrate the effectiveness of the device. …
Japan's leading car maker, Toyota Motor Corp., has a new product : It's a super tree with the capacity to absorb 30% more toxic gases from smog than its regular botanical cousin. Toyota is into trees in a big way. Forty researchers have been beavering away in the company laboratory …
is a bacterium that can supposedly carry a metal load that is equal to its own weight. Amazing, right? The bug, the common cyanobacterium Oscillatoria sp which has been isolated from Wazirabad Yamuna water, can scavenge as much as one gram of copper per gram dry weight at 120 ppm …
In the black depths of the night, a seal's extremely sensitive whiskers allow it to catch fish it cannot even see. Seals and sea lions do not use sonar like the bats. Instead, Guido Dehnardt and his colleagues from the University of Bonn in Germany suspected that their whiskers, which …
SITKA spruce trees of Alaska are proving to be no more than sitting ducks for the budworm caterpillars that are munching their way through the forests. In the past five years, these caterpillars have affected as much as 40,000 hectares (ha) of sitka spruce. Ecologists are now blaming higher temperatures …
FIRST, it was the test tube baby. Now, Canadian scientists are trying to do the same thing with coniferous trees. Assisted conception of conifers, they say, is all set to become the next big thing in forestry. By overcoming barriers between species, their technique could allow plant breeders to produce …
SAND dunes extending till the land meets the sky. That is what we expect a desert scene to be like, right? Wrong. Give geneticists and plant biologists some more time and they promise to make the deserts green. Researchers in Japan have found ways to help plants beat the desert …
ASK the top brass of any oil or coal firm about global warming, and they are likely to dismiss it as a well-imagined theory cooked up by a handful of ardent environmentalists. In recent years these people have taken great pains to acquire satellite data that apparently show how the …
SEA turtles help fertilise the dunes where they lay their eggs, says an ecologist from Florida, who believes their unhatched eggs make an important contribution to the health of the beach. Coastal dunes are notoriously fragile, providing barely enough nutrients to support the animals and plants living on them. According …
The Rhinoceros sonda'icus annami-ticus, a rare and threatened sub-species of Javan rhinos unique to Vietnam, are facing certain extinc-tion. A recently-conducted census of the animals' footprints suggests that their population in Vietnam is down to the last five . "They can survive for only two or three more years unless …
An accident at a steel mill in Spain has contaminated large parts of southern Europe with radioactivity, say environmentalists. The Spanish Nuclear Safety Council says scrap containing the readioctive metal caesium-137 was mistakenly fed into the smelter of a steel mill in Algeciras, near Gibraltar, at the end of May …
AFTER years of disbelief, the world has finally realised that global warming, far from being an eccentric theory cooked up by environmentalists, is a very real threat. We are feeling the effects already: the us, for instance, experienced one of the hottest summers in its history this year. And if …
IT is easy to dump waste in deep-ocean trenches - far harder to check that it has not seeped from its containers into the sea. Now, though, colonies of glowing bacteria offer some hope. When they sense pollution in the water around them, they get dimmer. "Our idea is that …
SOME 10 kilometres from the din of Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, India, the gharial - a member of the reptile fam-ily - is getting a second lease of life. More than two decades ago, the Gharial Rehabilitation Centre was set up here in the Kukrail reserve forest area. Its aim: …
BEES may be busy, but are not always the avid shift workers that scientists have long presumed them to be. American entomologists have found that young honeybees work and rest at completely random times, unlike older, foraging bees, who have a distinct internal rhythm. They even get jet-lag if flown …
Researchers at Japan's Marine Biotechnology Institute at Shimizy City are currently conducting sea trials of a new nontoxic paint that prevents fouling of ships' hulls by mussels and barnacles. Made from tribromogramine (TBG), a com-pound that mussels and barnacles detest, the new paint does not release damaging chemicals into the …
Common garden earthworms ooze nitrous oxide, commonly known as laughing gas. As a greenhous gas, these exhalations could contribute to global warming, German researchers warned the recently-concluded meeting of the American Society of Microbiology in Atlanta, USA. Carola Matthies and her col-leagues from the University of Bayreuth in Germany were …
AWE-STRUCK tourists look down through the glass-bottomed boat only to be welcomed by an explosion of colours on the ocean-bed. Deep blue, bright yellow, red with streaks of white - colours of the corals. Welcome to Andaman's folly Boy island, where these corals draw a large number of tourists every …
ASIA'S once-abundant sea horse population has gone down drastically in recent years, owing to heavy demand for their use in traditional medicines, aphrodisiacs and aquariums, said conservationists. Destruction of their habitat is another major cause for their decline, they say. "We're dealing with a situation where we still have some …
TROPICAL forests have been disappearing at alarming rates for the past three decades. Farmers, ranchers and timber industries have denuded millions of acres, and only in the past few years has the resultant damage to the ecosystem has become agonisingly clear. A new study by botanists at the University of …
