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 …
Shifting cultivation has been criticised as unscientific and blamed for the environmental problems in the hills. Do you agree? On the contrary, shifting agriculture is a fine example of how a production system can be adapted to an ecological niche. Very often shifting cultivation is talked about as a single …
JUST BEFORE 4 am on September 30, the stylus tracing out the narrow, wavy line on the seismographs at the Indian Meteorological Department's (IMD) seismological observatory in Delhi began to oscillate violently. As the graphs rolling out of the machine's printer began to indicate an earthquake 1,400 km away, the …
A COMMON parasitic disease of the human nervous system, neurocysticercosis, is often mistaken for tuberculosis of the brain. And, because doctors are unable to distinguish between the two, the disease claims numerous lives each year. But now, scientists at the Astra Research Centre India and the National Institute for Mental …
AN INDIAN scientist from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests ordinary tubelights can be used to cheaply disinfect water, especially in rural areas. "It's not as if I have discovered something new," says Ashok Gadgil. "In fact, breweries, bakeries and pharmaceutical laboratories use mercury vapour lamps (such as tubelights) to …
AUDIO compact discs (CDs) were only half the story. Electronic entertainment manufacturers are now getting ready to flood the market with high-resolution video CDs that can be played on an audio CD player by simply attaching an adaptor. They are also planning to launch video recorders that can record digital …
AS THE global warming debate heats up, scientists are looking towards the most unlikely source for clues -- penguins. They suspect the availability of fish on which penguins feed is increasing in the waters of the Antarctic Ocean, which are warming slightly. Therefore, fatter penguins would indirectly confirm the greenhouse …
DOES A hare flee when it spots a fox? Interestingly, no. Instead, it stands upright and signals its presence by flashing its ventral fur. As a brown hare can run much faster, once the fox knows it has been spotted, it desists from chasing the hare, thereby saving a lot …
PEOPLE with strong body odour may probably be carrying a faulty gene, according to researchers from London's St Mary's Hospital Medical School. The researchers say they are close to nailing the gene defect because of which the carriers cannot process a chemical called trimethylamine, a product of digestion that smells …
FOR MOST girls, fear emanates from an under-the-bed-world. In an experiment in which children aged three to four years were asked about their night-time fears, significantly more girls than boys referred to an underworld peopled with ogres and monsters, says Richard Coss, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis. …
IN BUT one example of the heady new world opening up to civilian scientists after the end of the Cold War, biologists used the US navy's formerly top secret underwater listening devices to track a blue whale for 43 days. Marine biologist Adam S Frankel said the surveillance system has …
WHILE constructing a wall, masons ensure with the help of a plumb line that bricks are aligned vertically, for otherwise, the wall could fall. But conventional methods of alignment using instruments such as spirit-levels and plumb-lines are time-consuming and error-prone. They also cannot meet the level of precision required while …
SCIENTISTS at the Gandhigram Rural Institute (GRI) in Tamil Nadu have found that used tubelights can be recycled into inexpensive laboratory apparatus, which will cost just one-tenth of what such apparatus costs in the market. B V Appa Rao, head of the university's science instrumentation centre and his team have …
IN THE wake of economic liberalisation, the need to streamline the country's research and development (R&D;) institutions acquires a sense of urgency. However, ongoing protests by scientists at two leading institutions over who should head these bodies highlight the difficulties of implementing such measures. In the first case, relating to …
IN RUDYARD Kipling's The Jungle Book, the sagacious elephant reveals to a rapt animal audience the mystery of the black stripes on the body of Sher Khan, the tiger: They were nothing but bramble scratches. That was Kipling's pigment of imagination. Scientists now believe the designer of colourful patterns on …
The successful completion of all launch preparations for the polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV) did much to dispel the shadow of gloom in the Indian space establishment, cast in July by the US forcing Russia to withhold transfer of cryogenic technology to India. In a more cheerful mood than he …
IF ONE thing is certain in life, it is death. In thinking of death, two things come to mind. First, there is a certain moment at which life ceases. Second, even with the most health-conscious lifestyle, luck in avoiding accidents and freedom from illness, the likelihood of dying increases as …
THOSE who wax lyrical about the superior sound quality of compact discs over records or vice versa, do so merely for the sake of argument, conclude German music psychologists who found that only one out of 40 persons could distinguish between sounds from the two (New Scientist Vol 139, No …
NOW THAT the Russians have finally backed out of the deal to supply India with cryogenic rocket-engine technology, Indian space scientists face their biggest technological challenge ever. With more countries wanting communication facilities, satellite launching promises to be big business in the highest of high-tech leagues. The US, afraid of …
Each launch vehicle progressively developed by India is capable of placing bigger payloads into higher orbits. The country's hope of carving a niche in the space-launch market rests on the GSLV
Moscow's abrupt cancellation of the $350-million cryogenic engine deal with India is self-interest, pure and simple. This was conceded by no less a person than Yuri Koptev, who headed the Russian space team in the "negotiations" in Washington. Cancelling the contract with India, Koptev told a recent parliamentary hearing in …
