The report presents a mixed picture. Over the past 25 years, there have been notable improvements in child well-being in the group of countries examined in this report: steady decline in child mortality, overall reduction in adolescent suicide and increase in school completion rates. But the last five years have …
ORDINARY postal services, now commonly referred to as 'snail mail', took a back seat with the advent of electronic or e-mail. Users with e-mail facility prefer to by-pass the various irritating hurdles 'snail mail' is prone to with a single key-stroke on their computers. But in this age of faster-than-eye …
THE Dutch government inspectors have played down the health risks posed by chemicals released into an Amsterdam suburb following the 1992 crash of an El Al cargo plane. But the inspectors admit that some questions cannot be answered because documents detailing the plane's cargo are incomplete. Claims of a cover …
The Invention Promotion Company of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, has patented a flower garden that func- tions as a clock -a modem version of an idea cooked up by Linnaeus, the 18th-century Swedish botanist and father of taxonomy. The flowers of catnip open between 6 am and 7 am, orange hawkweed …
EUROPE's biotechnology patent laws are to be challenged by the Netherlands in the European Court. The case will restart a longstanding debate over the legitimacy of patenting biotech inventions based on living organisms. This could prove to be a major setback for the European pharmaceutical industry. In May 1998, the …
SHORE birds usually find prey by probing until they strike a clam or a crab. Some can even feel vibrations from buried animals with their bills. But now, researchers in the Netherlands have found one specie which takes advantage of the properties of wet sand to find deeply buried, motionless …
TOXIC industrial chemicals have been discovered in the tissues of whales that normally feed in the deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Even though the quantities found may not be harmful, their findings show how far the chemicals have penetrated the ocean's food chain. The chemicals found are the polybrominated …
ever since the first patent for mechanical refrigeration was granted to Jacob Perkins in 1834, the quest for more efficient and faster refrigeration has been on. Lately, the emphasis has also been on making refrigeration less damaging to the environment as the chloroflourocarbon (cfc) gases are harmful to the ozone …
if there is one device that has truly revolutionised our lives, it is the transistor. Since its invention in the late 1940s, this device has made the entire microelectronics revolution
one of the pressing issues of this century is the ways and means to combat rampant pollution. Every country has formulated different policies to control the environmental damage. The book, Pollution Control in the South and North; A Comparative Assessment of Environmental Policy Approaches in India and the Netherlands, is …
materials which change their properties under different conditions are every designer's dream. From simple quartz crystals to heat-sensing devices, a list of their potential uses can run into hundreds of pages. In the past, a lot of effort went into designing materials that can become transparent or reflective as desired. …
airships seem to have the potential of offering a good alternative to aeroplanes and road vehicles in some segments of the passenger transport market, say researchers in the Netherlands. Airships are dirigible-powered balloons and derive their lift from a gas (usually helium) that is lighter than air. The airship's body …
colour is all when it comes to mating. The cichlid species of fish depend on the ability to distinguish colours for mate selection. But eutrophication of the Great Lakes in Africa
noise pollution threatens to close the Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. The airport is located in the heart of Europe's most densely populated region, an urban sprawl stretching from Amsterdam through The Hague to Rotterdam. Amsterdam's air traffic has almost doubled since 1990 and is up 11 per cent this year alone, …
studies on rheumatoid arthritis indicate that treatment with strong drugs may work better than the gradual approach to the crippling disease. Rheumatoid arthritis is an auto-immune disease, which is caused when the body's immune system turns against the tissue in the joints . Doctors in Belgium and Holland say that …
Dutch scientists have discovered a gene that makes plants resistant to nematodes, and are using it to develop transgenic worm-resistant crops. Every year the world loses about US $100 billion worth of crops to tiny pests that live in the soil and eat the roots of plants. Researchers at the …
electro , a unique programmable lock has been developed by tno , a major independent r&d; Institution in Holland and Lips Sloten, a lock manufacturer in Europe. It is the first lock system that will not have any duplicate keys. The new lock incorporates a programmable memory and a reader, …
the contraceptive pill, discovered in the 1960s, has a success rate of 99.9 per cent and is one of the most popular contraceptives. It is said to have revolutionised women's lifestyles. But it is now known that the pill can cause problems such as weight gain, headaches, and disturbance in …
Antarctic seabirds are accumulating dangerously high levels of toxic organic chemicals in their bodies, according to Nico van den Brink of the Institute for Forestry and Nature Research in Wageningen, the Netherlands. He says the culprit is pollution produced by industrial plants thousands of kilometres away. He focused in particular …
AlewiJn Ott and Monique Bretler of Erasmus University, Rotterdam, have concluded that people who smoke are twice as likely to develop senile dementia as compared to those who have never smoked. The study was conducted over a period of two years on 6,870 people above 55 years of age. They …
The great smog disasters of the past have made clear that air pollution can kill people in a matter of days: extremely high concentrations of air pollution building up under conditions of low wind speed and stable atmospheric conditions have been associated with excess deaths in the Meuse Valley, Belgium …
