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. …
Do you want to live longer? Some recent research may have taken you one step closer to this. Researchers have known for years that they could extend the lives of species, from yeast to rodents, by restricting their food intake. But the mechanism has remained mysterious. Recently, a team led …
After issuing countless statements to the contrary in the past decades, the US government has at last admitted that workers who helped make nuclear weapons in the early years of the nuclear age were exposed to radiation and chemicals that produced cancer and early death. The admission comes in the …
Helicobacter pylori , the gut bacterium that causes ulcer and cancer, has troubled scientists for a while. The bug manages to survive in the acidic environment of our stomach. Scientists assumed that urease, an enzyme found on its surface, broke down urea to produce ammonia, which neutralised the acid. George …
some us scientists have tried to find out how the cells identify and move in a favourable direction. The dynamics of cellular preferences for a particular direction has puzzled the scientists for a long time. Especially so when such preferences are made on minute cellular scales. Tiang Jin and colleagues …
The Earth's oceans are going to dry up and disappear in approximately a billion years. Anyway by then there would be no human beings to mourn the loss as much of the carbon dioxide would have been used up, killing majority of the plants, which not only sustain the rest …
Researchers have recently found that certain geologic phenomena may exist that could lead to better predictions of earthquakes on the San Andreas fault, which affects San Francisco. The rubbing slabs that form the fault seem to produce less heat than other faults, suggesting that it is lubricated somehow and is …
Geologists have known for long that formation of mountains affects the Earth's ecosystems. But due to the uncertainty in establishing the age of the highest mountains, the relationship between formation of topography and tectonic processes is unclear. One way to ascertain the variation of physical features is the effect that …
Three sick smokers in the US have been awarded a total of US $12.7 million in compensatory damages by a Florida jury in a verdict that indicted cigarette manufactures for their illness. This is the highest compensation paid in the country in a sick-smokers case and the verdict comes as …
Twenty needles - nine pierced in each leg and two in the belly - with the probes attached to a mild electrical current gave Harold Katcoff of Baltimore, us , the relief that aspirins, steroids and anti-inflammatory drugs could not. Suffering from osteoarthritis (a chronic disease of the joints caused …
a voluntary programme has been launched by the us Environment Protection Agency ( epa ) to encourage state and local governments and businesses to retrofit older diesel engines with pollution control devices. Under the "Diesel Retrofit Initiative,' pollution from existing heavy-duty diesel engines used in trucks, buses and construction equipment …
a strain of genetically modified (gm) rice has been created by scientists to combat Vitamin A deficiency, the main cause of blindness that effects as many as 250 million children the world over. Swiss biotechnologist Ingo Potrykus, who led the Vitamin A research, said his team was also completing work …
the genetic material in our cells is a wonder of nature. By using a few building blocks, nature has been able to encode a vast amount of information in our DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) about us. Now a team of scientists at the University of Wisconsin have used DNA as a …
Tired of government apathy towards patenting of knowledge indigenous to the people of India by individuals and groups in foreign lands, a petitioner has moved the Supreme Court. Earlier, neem, amla, mustard, castor, turmeric and basmati were patented by foreign companies. Now it is the turn of the karela (bitter-gourd), …
the ozone hole above Antarctica may not be damaging life in the ocean below. A team of researchers led by Kevin Arrigo of Stanford University in California, usa , has concluded that increased ultraviolet radiation has hardly affected marine plankton, the base of the ocean's food web. The team has …
the giant us oil company Texaco Inc has quit from the Global Climate Coalition ( gcc ), a business group that opposes the Kyoto Treaty's approach to combat global warming. The gcc is also an aggressive critic of scientific studies linking global warming to emissions from fossil fuels. After Ford …
"there are few areas where cooperation is needed more than on the issues of climate change and clean energy,' said us President Bill Clinton, addressing a group of environmentalists and journalists at a meeting in Agra during his visit on March 22, 2000. The speech, which also promised to fund …
purging nut or physic nut ( Jatropha Curcas) is a native to tropical America. It is also found in many parts of Asia and Africa. In Cape Verde Islands, it is cultivated as an oil-yielding seed crop. In Madagascar, where the plant is grown as a support for the vanilla …
Agricultural scientists at Hydro Agri in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, have developed optical sensors, which when mounted on a tractor, can tell exactly how much fertiliser each square metre of a field needs to achieve higher yields. Some areas in a field produce a better yield than others because the quality of …
The Casade frog ( Rana cascade ) and the Western toad ( Bufo boreas ) are dying, so is the Pacific tree frog. But there is probably no single cause for the dwindling population of these sentinel creatures, says zoologist Andrew Blaustein of the Oregon State University, USA. Increased ultraviolet …
