The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has published the R&D; Roadmap for Green Hydrogen Ecosystem in India. This document was published on 13th October, 2023. One of the central pillars of the National Green Hydrogen Mission is the establishment of a supportive research and innovation ecosystem for green hydrogen …
Seed companies are beating a path to the office of a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, entranced by the commercial prospects of his discovery of a single gene that could greatly improve the quality of proteins in plants. In a major breakthrough, Asis Datta, professor of molecular …
STATIC library budgets in India and soaring printing costs abroad have drastically reduced the inflow of foreign science and technology (S & T) journals. Indian institutions subscribe to less than 20 per cent of the 60,000 S & T journals published the world over. The number has dropped alarmingly -- …
Environment ministry guidelines state that many of the adverse impacts of thermal plants can be foreseen and minimised through judicious siting, preventive and control measures and effective environmental management. The ministry has been trying to impose very strict emission controls and other standards to mitigate the environmental problems of power …
WHEN animals live in groups, many paradoxes occur that are hard to explain within the framework of the classical Darwinian theory of natural selection. For example, a honey-bee spends its entire life working selflessly for the welfare of its queen mother and thousands of its sibling larvae. In 1964, scientist …
The results of a study on the fishery, biology, exploitation and mortality of hilsa shad (Hisa ilishu) are presented. The average annual landing of Hilsa ilisha for 1979 - 88 was 5710 tonnes forming 0.4% of the total landings. The major craft and gears and the contributions of different states …
JOHN BURDON Sanderson Haldane, who was born November 5, 1892, is remembered today mainly for developing a quantitative theory of evolution. He was also a superb populariser of science, a strong believer in rationality and a Marxist. Exuberantly boyish in many ways, he was also kind and gentle. When Haldane …
SCIENTISTS at the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeobotany in Lucknow and the Indian Institute of Tropical Botany in Pune have found growth rings of tropical trees such as teak (Tectona grandis) and tun (Cedrela toona) can be used to reconstruct the climate, especially the vagaries of the monsoon, in the …
INDIAN scientists are seeking solutions to such persistent problems as population, disease, hunger and pollution in a new clutch of technologies, collectively called biotechnology, which makes use of living organisms and their components -- genes, cells, proteins and enzymes -- to produce desired products. Research in this field is coordinated …
A VULTURE is really a stork and albatrosses belong to the same super-family as the flightless penguins. This is what US ornithologists, Charles Sibley, Jon Ahlquist and Burt Monroe have concluded in their recent rearrangement of traditional classification, based on a controversial new technique developed by them known as DNA-DNA …
INDIAN scientists rank among the 10 most prolific producers of scientific papers in the world; yet their research is among the least cited in international scientific and technological literature. This dismal finding is contained in a paper published in the Journal of Industrial and Scientific Research (Vol 51, No 2) …
A biodegradable enzyme that can replace two conventional agents now used to de-hair animal skins for leather manufacture has been produced by the Madras-based Central Leather Research Institute (CLRI). Christened Clarizyme, the enzyme is extracted from a fungus, Aspergillus sp. It has several advantages over the conventional agents, calcium oxide …
WHEN YEAST'S chromosome III became the first chromosome to have its DNA described fully, a big surprise lay in store for scientists: They stumbled upon a wealth of genes whose functions are completely unknown. "All of a sudden we learn there is a whole class of genes, more than half …
RECENT studies by four independent teams of astronomers indicate that planetary systems resembling the young solar system may exist in nearby parts of the galaxy. Three of these studies, presented at a recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society, focussed on a star called Beta Pictoris, which is visible from …
BIRD-WATCHERS, studying the mating habits of different species since the early 1970s, are discovering that faithlessness is common and most birds fancy a romp outside their nest. The cuckoo's waywardness is well-known, but this is so even among birds hitherto thought to be monogamous, such as the guillemot (Uria aalgae), …
The curtain shrouding the Indo-Russian rocket deal seems to be lifting at last with U R Rao, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), reiterating recently that the deal was "very much on". Work on developing the engine jointly is proceeding on schedule and India has "made the initial …
The Hindi proverb that derides the enfeebled mind as one with "worms in the brain", is no longer a literary expression. A study involving 159 worm-infected Jamaican children between 9 and 12, showed that removing moderate to heavy amounts of worms from children led to a significant memory improvement, in …
Researchers at the Central Drug Research Institute in Lucknow have successfully used a crude extract from the plant baruri (Crataeva nurvala) to dissolve stones in bladder and kidney. G K Patnaik of CDRI's Centre for Advanced Pharmacological Research on Traditional Remedies says lupeol can be extracted from baruri and used …
Only one per cent of the world's bacteria -- those that can be cultured in the lab -- are known, but molecular techniques pioneered by the Agricultural and Food Research Council (AFRC) in Britain will enable researchers to identify and classify bacteria into reliable genetic groupings. This will provide a …
Global warming, but so what? The data on its impact is still uncertain and contradictory. USA's Environment Protection Agency commissioned a study which involved 50 scientists from around the world for three years. The scientists found that the total cereal production by 2060 could be 1 per cent to 7 …
EVE MAY not have been the mother of the human race after all. Molecular biologists have been arguing that the genetic components of human beings indicate that all family trees lead back to a single African woman, nicknamed Eve, who lived about 200,000 years ago. But there is a school …
