The Global Gender Gap Index annually benchmarks the current state and evolution of gender parity across four key dimensions (Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment). It is the longest-standing index tracking the progress of numerous countries’ efforts towards closing these gaps over time since …
A COMPOUND derived from the female sex hormone oestrogen has been found effective at suppressing tumour growth, without the horrendous side-effects that normally accompany anti-cancer drugs. Theodore Fotsis of Children's University Hospital in Heidelberg, Germany, and his collaborators found that 2-methoxyoestradiol, formed in the body on the breakdown of oestrogen, …
WHEN German local and regional environment organisations formed the Bund fur Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland (German Association for Nature Conservation and the Protection of the Environment), their main objective was to strengthen their influence on the environment policy of the federal government. Today, BUND has become a major opinion leader …
Waste has become a global problem, and is demanding curative technologies that require almost preternatural efficiency to execute. And that keep collapsing nevertheless. Duales System Deutschland, Germany's hyped-up recycling programme for packaging material, for instance, burst almost immediately after it boomed, bloated with more quantities of junk than it was …
WOOD has again emerged as a popular heating fuel in Germany and France. A programme launched seven years ago in the thickly wooded Landes region of southwestern France to promote wood as fuel has proved remarkably successful. The plan was essentially aimed at clearing waste left behind by loggers and …
A LONG-STANDING mystery about how bees -- considered completely deaf -- hear has been solved. Bees are known to convey information about the distance, direction and potential of a new food source or nesting site through a complicated dance language involving the wagging of the abdomen and vibrating the wings …
LUFTHANSA airlines of Germany has been conferred the "Stratospheric ozone protection award" by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the US. EPA recognised the airline as the first in the world to do away with ozone-depleting chemicals used in the maintenance and overhaul of aircraft. The airline says it was …
SOLID waste is piling up in the Nepalese capital, Kathmandu. Entrepreneurs whose businesses are based on tourism say the country will lose tourists -- its major foreign exchange earner -- if the situation does not improve soon. Garbage disposal has been a problem since erstwhile West Germany, which had earlier …
THE EIGHTH session of the negotiating committee for a convention on climate change, held in August in Geneva, failed to agree on "joint implementation" by industrialised countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Joint implementation essentially means that industrialised countries can sponsor cheap efforts in the Third World to reduce greenhouse …
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 …
DRUG ADDICTION is not a modern age phenomenon for it seems even the ancients knew the pleasures of junkyism, claim scientists (The Lancet, Vol 341, No 8843). Franz Parsche and his colleagues at the Institute for Anthropology and Human Genetics in Munich, Germany, examined hair and tissue samples taken from …
THIS SLIM monograph explains Mahajan's preference for the term "human sciences" rather than "social sciences". Within the framework of social sciences, there are different disciplines, each analysing a particular dimension of the collective human enterprise. Human science stresses the similarities among different categories of human action and hence provides the …
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, …
THIRD World Network (TWN), a Malaysia-based environment group, has voiced its concern over some basic issues in USA's controversial interpretative statement of the Biodiversity Convention, which US President Bill Clinton has agreed to sign (Down To Earth, June 15, 1993). The US interpretation says, "Private parties (read companies) should have …
HOECHST, the German chemical company, continues to be plagued by accidents with the ninth so far since February 22 (See Down To Earth, April 30, 1993) consisting of toxic fumes that leaked from the main plant near Frankfurt. Neighbourhood residents, facing a danger from spreading fumes were asked to remain …
FOLLOWING a series of accidents at Hoechst AG, one of Germany's three major chemical manufacturers, stricter controls and guidelines are expected to be imposed on them. German federal minister for environment Klaus Topfer is determined to intensify pressure on the industry to adopt improved safety standards and in Hesse, the …
AS THE world's biggest per capita consumers of bananas, the Germans are understandably angered by an European Community (EC) proposal to restrict imports of the fruit from Latin America. The EC proposal, which is to come into effect July 1, would tax banana imports from Latin America at the rate …
EXPERIMENTAL observations have amply confirmed the Big Bang theory, but some of its shortcomings have led scientists to develop the so-called inflationary theory, to pursue their bid to trace the early history of the universe. Proposed originally by Alan Guth of MIT in 1980, the inflationary theory predicts the density …
ASTRONOMERS are excited about the recent observations made by the satellite ROSATwhich provide the strongest evidence yet that as much as 90 per cent of the matter in the universe is invisiblewhose presence is indicated by its gravitational pull on matter in space. Astronomers have been searching for this invisible …
GERMANY has demonstrated how economic instruments can be used effectively to promote environmental causes in a market economy. An ordinance on solid-waste management, for example, has resulted in excess packaging in stores being reduced by 98 per cent and the use of recycled material in packaging increasing to 25 per …
Hasn't Rio clearly shown we were living under an illusion when we thought environmental concerns would make a difference in the world power structure. Why should things change now? We have new developments stemming from a deteriorating economic position worldwide. There is a growing trend towards nationalism and fundamentalism that …
