Wiping out all of Africa’s elephants could accelerate Earth’s climate crisis by allowing 7% more damaging greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, scientists say. But conserving forest elephants may reverse the trend, providing a service worth $43billion in storing carbon, the academics found. The research, published in Nature Geoscience, shows that …
The benefit sharing scheme for arogyapacha saw hurdles right from the start. On July 22, 1995, the then chief minister of Kerala, A K Antony, was to sign a memorandum of understanding with Arya Vaidya Pharmacy (AVP), marking the technology transfer from the Tropical Botanical Garden and Research Institute (TBGRI). …
"We are now documenting the tribal medical knowledge and details of the medicinal plants that the tribals use," says Vishwanathan Nair, director, KIRTADS. A PhD in tribal medicine, Nair says he refused to publish his thesis as he first wanted to know what the tribals have got. He also fears …
In November 1995, TBGRI sold the formula to Arya Vaidya Pharmacy (AVP) of Coimbatore for a licence fee of Rs 10 lakh to produce the drug for seven years. The licence fee and the 2 per cent royalty on the profits from the formulation was to be shared equally by …
IT COULD well be one of the most exhaustive scientific pursuits undertaken in post-independence India. The All India Coordinated Research Project on Ethnobiology (AICRPE) has unearthed a large spectrum of uses that tribal popuations of the country make of plants and animals. Home to some of the world's most diverse …
THEY have been mistaken for extraterrestrial visitors, supernatural phenomenon and everything in between. And recently, the crew of an Air UK jet, which was struck by lightning, saw "fireballs in the cabin". Ball lightning is the term that is given to these mysterious balls of fire that usually appear during …
SCIENTISTS at the New York University have come up with another possible way of helping women overcome infertility: they took the genes of an infertile woman and injected them into a donor egg from a fertile woman. The technique, which is similar to the one which was used to clone …
Scientists at the United States department of agriculture are conducting studies on the biology and the ecology of mushrooms to provide a better understanding to manage resources efficiently. Research is being conducted to ensure that harvests are sustainable and to determine the influences of forest management practices on fruits and …
SCIENTISTS in India have developed a genetic probe to prevent poaching of the endangered one-horned rhinoceros. The probe, developed by scientists at the New Delhi-based National Institute of Immunology (NII), can detect rhino horn even if it is crushed into powder or mixed with something else to deceive detection by …
PHYSIOLOGICAL features distinguish Negroids from Mongoloids. And one could never think they could have a common ancestors. But a team of international scientists have a piece of advice: don't judge a book by its cover. According to them, most of the Chinese population has genes of African descent. Difficult to …
IF ONLY governance was all about crying over spilt milk. India's administrators have more tears than all the proverbial waters of Neptune. And spilt milk it is when one of the country's most priceless animals, the Vechur cow, is at the sacrificial altar of bureaucratic impotence. An application for a …
RESEARCHERS at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, say they have come across something unprecedented in their 30 years of study of the Universe. A burst of radiation from a star smashed into the Earth's uppermost atmosphere on August 27. The radiation, they say, had enough energy to power civilisation …
THEORIES of gravity are coming under scrutiny because of the bizarre behaviour of some spacecraft. "We have been working on this problem for several years, and we accounted for everything we could think of," says John Anderson, planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), …
STEP aside professor, your computer is about to make an important invention. Yes, intelligent computer programs are beginning to make discoveries of their own, as well as saving valuable research time. Stephen Muggleton, a computer scientist at the University of York, UK, has been working with molecular biologists at the …
Aviation history was made recently when an unpiloted aircraft flew over the Atlantic safely for the very first time. The designers of this remarkable robot plane say the breakthrough could eventually lead to improved weather forecasting. The robot aircraft, designed research teams based in Australia and the US, flew from …
EVEN as we count off the days to the next century, scientists and computer professionals are hard at work, wracking their brains to come up with a solution to the millennium bug, a problem that promises to acquire fearful proportions in the next few years. What exactly is this bug? …
"Fifty per cent of the malaria cases are human made. Government spreads malaria by policy" V PSharma Former director of Malaria Research Centre, Delhi "Plague will erupt in small pockets along the Indira Gandhi canal (in the Thar desert). I hope it does not happen" Ishwar Prakash Rodent expert, with …
What does environmental deterioration lead to? It leads to changes in the planet's life support systems. When these systems become weak, their ability to support life deteriorates. Consequently, the health of individuals living in that ecosphere is bound to be affected. Some species profit by these changes and others lose …
Our bodies exist in the environment and we carry a soup of chemicals within us and we cannot stay insulated from the changes taking place in the environment. If the environment degrades, so does the state of our health. The key to good health is therefore in many ways a …
Scientists worldwide now accept that along with industrialisation and urbanisation, there has been a steady destruction of nature. Cities and industries have both affected clean air and clean water. Industries produce a lot of hazardous wastes; and cities produce a lot of garbage. Hazardous wastes pollute the groundwater. Accumulation of …
This year is the hottest year since temperature records have been kept. Scientists believe that the Earth is getting warmer because of the build-up of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, produced largely by the burning of fossil fuels. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, an international …
