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 …
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 …
WHAT is common to syringes and mosquitoes? Both, to a point, perform similar functions: piercing the skin and drawing blood. But syringes, unlike mosquitoes, do not infect us with diseases. Malaria, filariasis, dengue... spread thanks these winged pests. However, researchers are now trying to genetically alter mosquitoes so that they …
Scientists may soon explain the mys-terious behaviour of some icebergs. They have discovered a submerged "ice foot" extending more than 50 metres (m) out to sea from the wall of a glacier. This could explain why icebergs sometimes suddenly come up to the ocean surface in unexpec-ted places. Researchers suspect …
NEARLY two kilometres inside the surface of the Pacific Ocean, molten magma from the Earth's mantle wells up. This process is taking place along the Juan de Fuca Ridge, which is pushing even the Pacific plate apart from the Juan de Fuca plate. The rate at which the plate is …
A GIANT meteorite struck the northern edge of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico 65 million years ago. The collision caused a crater 192 kilometres (km) wide and wiped out nearly half the world's species, including the dinosaurs. Recently, scientists have discovered that the impact shattered the edge of the continent, …
The draft of the PVP Act is hanging fire since 1994. It was to be tabled in Parliament earlier this year. What happened? The PVP involves several angles and several ministries ministry of environment and forests (MEF), foreign affairs, commerce and the department of science and technology. All of them …
IF THE findings of an international team of researchers led by Steve Weiner of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehevot, Israel, are confirmed, then it is time to rewrite 60 years of anthropology textbooks. The findings will reshape the modern view of Homo erectus, the pre-sumed ancestor of today's …
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 …
The frozen remains of Otzi the Neolithic hunter contain the best-preserved nervous tissue yet discovered in an ancient human, say German biologists. Climbers stumbled on the Tyrolean ice man in the Alps in 1991. Now Michael Hess and his colleagues of the University of Innsbruck in Austria have analysed the …
NEWS from home: Indian aeronautical scientists and engineers are working on an ambitious project called Micro Air Vehicles (MAY) to produce aircraft that will not be much bigger than the palm of our hand. These "palm-top" planes will be crucial in operations which would require them to fly to spots …
THE National Metallurgical Laboratory (NML) and Tata Korf have jointly developed a clean technology blast furnace at Agra that would lower the sulphur dioxide (so2) emissions and fine dust from the hundreds of foundries around the Taj Mahal. The laboratory has developed the technology and transferred to Tata Korf, which …
IN WHAT is seen as a punitive action against scientists for India's achievement in the nuclear field, the Clinton administration has asked seven Indian scientists working in the US to leave the country. According to a leaked memorandum by US energy secretary Federico Pena, 75 other Indian scientists working in …
linzhou , a tiny mountain province in China, has seen a lot of action lately. Here, in a nondescript red-brick health centre, next to a metalworking shop that could be perfectly at home in the Middle Ages, us and Chinese doctors operated recently on Chinese peasants with high-tech medical equipment …
since the discovery of high temperature superconductivity (hts) in ceramic materials in 1986, there has been a lot of debate about the applications of these revolutionary materials. Several applications have been discovered for the phenomena. But one area where there has been a roadblock is the development of wires made …
a two-year campaign against genetic engineering by environmentalists, animal rights and consumer groups in Switzerland received a severe jolt on June 7, when Swiss voters, in a referendum, decisively rejected a proposal to ban the production and patenting of genetically modified organisms ( gmo s). The people rejected the ban …
computers are becoming "literate". Using a recently developed software, home computers will now be able to access your writing skills. However, getting rid of critics might just take a little more time. Teachers benefit the most: grading student essays is far from getting tedious, say the developers of the software. …
Scientists in China have planned to clone the giant panda as a means of saving the extremely endangered species, according to a participating researcher. In this regard, the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences has granted us $12,000 to fund a project at its Institute of Zoology, said assistant researcher Duan …
A large section of an ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula has broken away as a possible result of global warming, say scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) based at the University of Colorado, USA. Recent satellite images show that a section about 40 km-long and …
Scientists from the Indian Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) have recently patented a breakthrough biotechnological process that can be employed to produce kevlar aramid fibres used extensively in aircraft, space systems and rocket motor casings. These are also used as high-strength materials to make fibre-reinforced polymer matrix composites that …
