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 …
In the US, this is the third year of farmers successfully growing crops that are genetically engineered to make their own pesticide, known as Bt toxin, a natural poison obtained from the soil bacterium * Bacillus thuringensis *. Even organic farmers approve of Bt-crops as the toxin is highly specific …
two reports about the fate of sea birds affected by oil slicks reveal a very sorry picture about their survival after they are released from captivity. In the uk , for example, only one per cent of guillemots (a sea bird) survived the first year of release. In the Netherlands, …
Researchers have devised a new method to purify water using extracts of herbal plants. The new method has been developed by researchers at the Visvesvarya College of Engineering, Nagpur, using extracts of tulsi, wheat and neem leaves.
A simple filter developed in the US can free water of arsenic and may help prevent millions in West Bengal and Bangladesh from being poisoned by it.The filter, based on sand and iron filings, converts almost all the arsenic in water in insoluble compounds, according to a recent report in …
Apart from inorganic compounds, bioagents like funguscan also help remove radioactive metals such as uranium and thorium, and hazardous heavy metals like iron, lead and cadmium from industrial effluents. Recently, Turkish researchers stumbled upon a new method to decontaminate wasted water by applying a fungus called Rhizopus arrhizus reports Process …
It was long suspected that communication among whales suffered due to the use of sonar by the world's navies. Alexandros Frantzis of the University of Athens has recently come out with his findings that say whales may be suffering "collateral damage' due to sonar waves from naval vessels as they …
Lloyd Davis, zoologist at University of Otago, New Zealand, says that penguins use a practice similar to prostitution in order to obtain stones for their nests. Davis has made nine visits to Antarctica to study penguin behaviour. "They are not nearly as faithful as we thought,' he says. "They swap …
across the us , bats are burned, beaten or buried alive by people who are ignorant of their role in the ecology. Bats eat agricultural and forest pests, and also serve as seed and pollen dispersers. About 70 per cent of tropical fruits in the us market are from plants …
Urban industrial wastes contain organic matter such as leaves, vegetable wastes which, on a dry basis, have calorific values comparable to other biomass like wood. Scientists at the Combustion Gasification Propulsion laboratory, Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India, have recently developed cyclone gasifiers that can utilise these wastes for …
Petrol in Sweden will contain less sulphur than any in Europe by the year 2000. Swedish oil companies recently agreed to switch to petrol containing fewer than 50 parts sulphur per million (ppm). Planned European legislation will set a higher limit of 150 ppm. Rolf Annerberg, director-general of the Swedish …
Do not throw away those old telephone books and fruit juice packs, build your walls with them. Australia's national research centre, CSIRO, is backing a project to turn these "raw' ingredients into flat panels and mouldings that would normally be made of wood. CSIRO claims that the mix of paper …
as long as those little, green men do not show up, the third stone from the sun - Earth - remains the only planet that can boast of life. In fact, life is in such abundance here that science can often lose track of all the various lifeforms that we …
In the labs of Toyota Motor Corp. outside Nagoya, 40 researchers are working to improve an unlikely object : the tree. To counteract environmental damage from car and truck exhaust, Toyota is developing unique trees that can absorb some of the toxic gases contained in smog and might help prevent …
Scientists at the Sardar Patel Renewable Energy Research Institute in Gujarat have designed a low-cost filter that not only treats dairy effluents efficiently but also produces biogas in substantial quantities as a by-product.
in an effort to gather data regarding temperature, wind flow and other climatic factors in the Arctic Ocean and to minimise the ambiguity in global climate forecasting, a us $19.5-million study is being carried out in the Arctic. The project, known as Sheba (short for Surface Heat Budget of the …
thousands of fish in North Carolina and the Chesapeake Bay in the us have been killed by Pfiesteria , a dinoflagellate (unicellular, pigmented, aquatic organisms). This phenomenon is being attributed to an increase in the amount of nitrogen, phosphorus and other nutrients that wash off the land from fertilisers and …
Luis Nunez, laboratory chemist at the Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, USA, has developed a simple, compact and cost-effective method of removing fine metal particles and radionuclides from industrial waste and streams. The method employs particles that are poured into a tank containing a process or waste solution, where the …
In some rural areas the intensive use of nitrogen fertilisers has increased the concentration of nitrates in drinking water to dangerous levels. This cannot be dealt with by conventional water treatment techniques. The Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, has demonstrated a possible solution that involves passing the …
On 80 acres of wettest land in Catahoula Parish in Louisiana, an experimental crop of hardwood saplings is seizing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and locking it up in wooden cells. On each acre, the trees probably take in as much carbon dioxide each year as a typical automobile puts …
A joint research team from Osaka University, the University of Shizuoka and Takenaka Corp. has developed a technology using a fungus that secretes a potent degradative enzyme. These can then be used for degrading proteins and starches in the waste water.
