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. …
Attention joggers: do you really want to be the most hated person in your local jogging park? That is what the St Louis-based firm SBH is promising. The US firm has come up with the idea of musical running shoes. The heel of the shoe contains a music memory chip. …
Top environment officials from China and the us will meet in Beijing to exchange ideas and discuss specific cooperation schemes. Carol Browner, administrator of the us Environmental Protection Agency ( epa ) visited Beijing recently. Several letters of intent on Sino- us environment cooperation are expected to be signed. The …
A judge has frozen the Argentine assets worth us $60 million of Anglo-Dutch oil giant Royal Dutch/Shell Group and a German firm after an oil spill in the River Plate, a local official said. Juan Sibetti, mayor of Magdalena, 110 km southeast of Buenos Aires, told news agencies the assets …
An Iowa, USA, seed merchant has legally challenged the US Patent and Trademark Office, saying it erred in granting patents on modifications to plants such as corn, soyabeans and cotton. The federal court has set October 1999 as the date for hearing the petition. The court's action indicates that the …
According to a report by the US-based World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), the seasonal hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica reached record proportions in September 1998. Covering an area of 25 million square kilometres, or about 2.5 times the area of Europe, this hole surpassed the previous record
researchers based in the us and Panama claim that the tropical rainforests' rich diversity can be traced to a scarcity of seeds and to the process through which young plants fill in gaps as older, mature trees die. Their observations, based on a15-year study of over 300,000 trees may finally …
artificial muscles that give space robots animal-like flexibility and manipulation ability will be tested on a small nasa rover destined to explore an asteroid. The artificial muscles were developed by Yoseph Bar-Cohen and his team at nasa 's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, usa. The muscles are based on a simple, …
the key to all life on this planet is water. Without it, the Earth would have been just another planet, a tiny featureless speck in the Universe. Made of hydrogen and oxygen, water is another of nature's fantastic chance creations. Billions of years ago, it offered an excellent solvent and …
The US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded a US $3.5 million deal to a consortium of labs and companies to develop a prototype of a propulsion system that could propel microsatellites into space. These tiny microsatellites would measure about 10 cm along the edge and weigh a few …
Carbon nanotubes are being studied increasingly for their versatility and interesting properties. However, their incorporation into conventional microcircuits requires their synthesis and integration into silicon wafers, an important microelectronic material. Now, Jing Kong and his collaborators at Stanford University, USA, have reported a method to make high quality single-walled nanotubes …
Three years back, the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope aimed its Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 at what seemed to be an empty patch of sky, dubbed the Hubble Deep Field. The results revealed many far-off galaxies and strange, lumpy blue knots of light. Now, the spacecraft has reexamined the region …
A microchip with drug-administering capabilities could soon make the common household television (TV) a delight for the olfactory senses. The chip can store a large number of drugs and releases them by remote control. It was initially designed to be implanted in the human body, where it would administer drugs …
a frozen corpse and preserved samples from victims of the 1918 flu epidemic that killed up to 40 million people worldwide show the virus resembled the common swine flu. Tissue samples from three people who died in the epidemic have provided enough genetic material to allow researchers to sequence one …
millions of children in the United States are exposed to unsafe levels of potentially toxic pesticide residues. According to a study by Consumers Union, publisher of the magazine Consumer Reports , as little as a single serving of some popular fruits and vegetables may contain enough chemicals to exceed safety …
I t was too good to last. The honeymoon between the us -based Shaman Pharmaceuticals and 30 ethnic communities across Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia seems to be over. In February 1998, Provir, a promising anti-diarrhoeal drug based on ethnic medicinal knowledge, which Shaman was trying to develop for …
gasmasks were first introduced during the First World War as precautionary measures for soldiers. And though weapons have become much smarter, advanced and lethal since then, gasmasks still remain where they were almost a century ago. Most gasmasks available today use one or several filters to purify the air the …
BIRDS can sleep with one eye open and half of their brains awake. It is called Unithemispheric Slowave Sleep (usws). It allows birds to detect approaching predators while still getting a bit of sleep. "They are able to make behavioural decisions about whether to keep one half of the brain …
A 195-metre cargo ship carrying nearly 1.5 million litres of oil was set on fire by explosive experts in Coos Bay, Oregon, usa. The action was taken in anticipation of a fierce storm which threatened to break the freighter and worsen the oil spill. The state and federal authorities decided …
to avoid a second bruising of its trade relations with the us, the European Union ( eu ) is considering three options after the World Trade Organisation ( wto ) ruled against its recent ban on hormonally-treated us beef products. The first time the eu had trade clashes with its …
