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 …
TWO RUSSIAN scientists propose to get rid of radioactive waste by throwing it out of the solar system. The waste will be blasted out of the earth's atmosphere on conventional rockets and then fired out of the solar system using energy from the waste itself, according to Konversia, a Moscow-based …
FEW WOULD disagree that the monsoon in India is almost unparalleled in beauty, but not many realise the subtle nuances in the workings of nature that makes this season possible. These curious processes of nature continue to remain an enigma for the scientific community; nevertheless, we can draw parallels between …
SCIENTISTS of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries have recommended exchanging the germplasm of fruit, vegetables and potatoes; trials of popular potato varieties in different parts of the SAARC region, and organising training programmes on potato breeding. At a meeting on horticulture held recently in Shimla, the scientists …
INDIAN Space Research Organisation (ISRO) officials are not unduly worried by the stalled transfer of cryogenic rocket technology from Russia to India. They believe alternative cryogenic engine technology, which uses supercooled gases to fuel rockets, can be developed indigenously if Russia gives in to US pressure and withholds the transfer …
ARTHUR Nonomura, an American scientist-turned-farmer, may usher in another green revolution with his discovery that methanol (or methyl alcohol), traditionally thought to be toxic to plants, can stimulate crop growth in hot and dry regions. "I think it's going to save the world," says Andrew Benson of Scripps Institution of …
AS MANY as 2,000 scientists from former East Germany, who found themselves jobless after the country's behemoth research system was pruned, are now being denied promised university positions, as the universities do not want them. Before the reunification, research in East Germany was carried out by the Academy of Sciences, …
EVER SINCE man realised that sex is not limited to procreation, he has experimented with various concoctions to increase his libido. For scientists, however, aphrodisiacs such as ginseng and the Spanish fly have been little more than objects of ridicule. But now a traditional Indian sex vitaliser called Ipomea digitata …
BRITISH scientist William Bateson, who is responsible for coining the word "genetics", had an unusual scientific career. He started out as a student of animal morphology -- a branch of zoology that emphasises such obvious aspects of an organism as its form and the way it looks to us. Later, …
SCIENTISTS have found that the ability of certain rats to reject a tumour can be transferred to other rats using a simple technique that could one day be used to enhance human resistance to cancers. Ashok Khar of Hyderabad's Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) discovered a certain type …
PRAWNS are considered a delicacy in most parts of the world, but not everyone can enjoy eating them for they can cause severe allergic reactions -- pain in the abdomen, nausea, diarrhoea, hives, choking and even death. But now, P V Subba Rao and his colleagues at the Indian Institute …
INDIAN veterinarians have developed a vaccine against a viral disease, called Ranikhet disease, which causes haemorrhagic diarrhoea in poultry, especially hens. Though about 10 per cent of the infected hens die, farmers find more worrisome the drop of upto 40 per cent in egg production by the infected birds. Scientists …
MOST OF us know fish to be cold-blooded creatures that alter their temperature to match that of the surrounding water. But some fish, the tuna for example, are warm-blooded, a fact that had long puzzled biologists. Barbara A Block, biologist at the University of Chicago and three of her students …
IN JANUARY 1935, the monthly meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in London was unusually acrimonious. A young researcher from India, Subrahmanyam Chandrasekhar, had presented a paper in which he proposed a revolutionary theory regarding the fate of certain kinds of stars. The pre-eminent astrophysicist of the time, Arthur Eddington, …
DID AKBAR, the great Moghul (1556-1605), relish dam aalu? Probably not, especially as one doesn't have firm evidence he did. The record kept by his minister, Abul Fazl, of crops grown in India in Akbar's time doesn't mention the potato (called aalu, in Hindi). India produces about 16 million tonnes …
HOW DID birds learn to fly? For over a decade now, this question has been at the centre of a debate about whether Archaeopteryx, the world's oldest bird-like creature -- found nearly 150 million years ago -- was a bird or a dinosaur. While ornithologists believe Archaeopteryx was a bird …
ANY DAY NOW, we'll have the perfect potato -- not too waxy or floury, not mottled with bluish grey stains or with a scaly skin. When it does make its debut, it will be thanks to a little genetic engineering. Assures botanist Michael Wilkinson of the Scottish Crop Research Institute, …
PERHAPS one of the worst fears a woman harbours is that of getting breast cancer, a justifiable fear for, in USA alone, 46,000 women die every year of breast cancer -- and, this rate is increasing by 1 per cent annually. Despite the vast amounts of time and money pumped …
TWO BIOCHEMISTS at the Indian Institute of Science say chloroquine -- the primary drug used to combat malaria -- works against the malarial parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, by inhibiting protein synthesis. "This knowledge will help us understand how the parasite builds up resistance to the drug and it will also open …
SCIENTISTS have found in the foothills of the Andes mountains the remains of what they contend is the earliest dinosaur. Unlike its giant descendants, the discovery by a US-Argentinian team measured just over a metre from nose to tail-tip and weighed only 11 kg. The newly-found dinosaur has been named …
MANY OF the nation's premier scientific establishments have utilised government funding poorly and failed to meet their 1991-92 objectives, complains the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG). The CAG report, placed before Parliament on May 7, made its complaint on the basis of an audit of the working …
