Good Food is First Food. It is not junk food. It is the food that connects nature and nutrition with livelihoods. This food is good for our health; it comes from the rich biodiversity of our regions; it provides employment to people. Most importantly, cooking and eating give us pleasure. …
High levels of oil imports and high crude oil and gasoline prices in recent years have led to increased interest in the U.S. fuel supply. Recent congressional interest has focused on alternatives to petroleum, ways to improve the efficiency of the U.S. transportation sector, and ways to improve the stability …
Wetlands perform many essential ecosystem services—carbon storage, flood control, maintenance of biodiversity, fish production, and aquifer recharge, among others—services that have increasingly important global consequences. Like biodiversity hotspots and frontier forests, the world’s largest wetlands are now mapped and described by an international team of scientists, highlighting their conservation importance …
The ecologic effects of artificial light have been well documented. Light pollution has been shown to affect both flora and fauna. For instance, prolonged exposure to artificial light prevents many trees from adjusting to seasonal variations, according to Winslow Briggs’s chapter on plant responses in the 2006 book Ecological Consequences …
California sea lions have a large body burden of organochlorine pesticides, and over the last decade they have also been subject to domoic acid poisoning. Domoic acid poisoning, previously recognized in adult animals, is now viewed as a major cause of prenatal mortality. The appearance of a chronic juvenile domoic …
The potential impact of the global financial crisis of 2008 on living standards in the developing world has given renewed emphasis to the importance of social safety net programs. The right policies can be a smart investment in an uncertain world. This report reviews the evidence on conditional cash transfers …
This study uses a national agro-environmental production model to evaluate the environmental and economic impacts of introducing a market for corn stover to support a stoverbased ethanol industry. It explore the relationship between stover supply, aggregate environmental impacts, and different production practices or policies that can influence supply or mitigate …
Those who believe that their children are safe from the harmful effects of tobacco because they always smoke outside their homes, or inside only when kids are away, need to think about again. A new study has shown that tobacco smoke contamination lingers even after a cigarette has been extinguished. …
New method takes into account turbulence in flow of water ABOUT a hundred thousand farmers in Malda and Murshidabad districts of West Bengal lose land and homes to erosion caused by the Ganga every year. With little knowhow on when the river will wash away their farmland, they are compelled …
Overextended banks crashing, leading to recession. 1873 revisited In October, the American financial giant Lehman Brothers announced that it had gone bust. Within weeks global financial markets tumbled and economists predicted a financial meltdown. Comparisons with the Great Depression of the early 1930s began to be tossed around. To American …
Michael Crichton popularized fiction where science went wrong His admirers included US President George W Bush. The Sunday Telegraph called him an entertainment industry powerhouse. His collaborator in films, Steven Spielberg, regarded Michael Crichton as an inspired visionary who, time and again,
life sciences It is the small ones Smaller mosquitoes are better at transmitting diseases than larger ones. Researchers in the US fed mosquitoes blood contaminated with dengue virus and tested them for infection. Smaller-sized mosquitoes showed higher infection rates and greater potential to transmit the virus. Even a slight difference …
Crews were working to restore electricity to nearly 200,000 Michigan homes and businesses early Monday, a day after strong winds knocked down tree limbs and power lines, while residents in parts of the Northwest braced for another winter storm. Meanwhile, flood warnings were posted throughout the Midwest as temperatures rose …
Among all the possible fuels that can produce a zero-emission car, petrol must rank right at the bottom, if at all. But for mechanical engineer Andrei Fedorov, petrol is the right fuel, or at least good enough, to run a zero-emission car. Fedorov, a professor at the Georgia Institute of …
A coal ash spill in eastern Tennessee that experts were already calling the largest environmental disaster of its kind in US is more than three times as large as initially estimated, according to an updated survey by the Tennessee Valley Authority. Officials at the authority initially said that about 1.7 …
NEW DELHI: Seeking to expand the relationship in the energy sector, India and the U.S. have agreed to collaborate in developing gas hydrate resources, the ice-like structure that has natural gas trapped between water molecules found in abundance off the East Coast. Both countries signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) …
