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. …
Males and females of most species differ in several characteristics. But strangely, this is most obviously so with regard to traits that have no direct relation whatsoever to their reproductive functioning as males or females. Size, colour and pattern in birds and butterflies for instance and song in cicadas and …
A robot plane is due to take off from Newfoundland later this month and fly 3,000 km across the Atlantic to Ireland without any human intervention whatsoever. The flight, say the developers of the plane, should take 24 hours. The 14-kg plane has been designed by researchers at the University …
US naval scientists in California have developed a nonpolluting rocket fuel that burns alcohol and hydrogen peroxide. The key is the catalyst that the navy is keeping under wraps. The catalyst is suspended in alcohol and mixed with hydrogen peroxide. It breaks down the hydrogen peroxide into oxygen and water, …
LONELY? Depressed? Don't blame it on stress, work pressure or even physical ailments. It could be because of excessive use of the Internet, say researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. Studying the retreat of the human race indoors, researchers have found that too much time spent on …
ACCORDING to Japan's Kyodo news agency, the US navy used 10 dolphins as "minesweepers" in a recent naval exercise off Hawaii. This is part of the navy project to utilise ocean mammals. The dolphins worked along with the US, Australian and Canadian submariners to detect possible enemy mines. The dolphins …
ASK the top brass of any oil or coal firm about global warming, and they are likely to dismiss it as a well-imagined theory cooked up by a handful of ardent environmentalists. In recent years these people have taken great pains to acquire satellite data that apparently show how the …
SEA turtles help fertilise the dunes where they lay their eggs, says an ecologist from Florida, who believes their unhatched eggs make an important contribution to the health of the beach. Coastal dunes are notoriously fragile, providing barely enough nutrients to support the animals and plants living on them. According …
DAM FAILURE: Boliden, a Canadian mining company, blamed falling metal prices and costs associated with a dam rupture for the company's second-quarter loss. Pre-tax losses were $52.1 million compared with restated earnings of $19.7 million in the same time last year. The dam failure at the Los Frailes zinc mine …
According to the latest reports, sucralose, a new sugar substitute, has won the US Food and Drug Administration's (PDA's) approval as the first artificial sweetener to be used in a wide range of products. Sucralose was approved by the PDA for all practical uses as an artificial sweetener, including sweetening …
Controllers of the ill-fated Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) are struggling to bring the spacecraft under control. Mission controllers lost the craft at the end of June, but regained contact recently. However, the craft is spinning in such a way that its solar power cells get very little sunlight. The …
Some television companies in the US are trying to use controversial subliminal adverts, but they cannot hide from the system patented by Ericsson of Stockholm. By measuring the energy distribution in the video signal, Ericssons's system can detect the large changes that indicate a context change. If the detector spots …
THE computer scores another point. Distance learning became possible years ago with the advent of the World Wide Web. Now, us software experts have taken "distance learning" a step further. Deaf children in the US will soon be able to learn written English with the help of an Internet program …
Twelve billion light-years away, it was the biggest cosmic explosion since the Big Bang, the initial explosion that started it all, say astronomers. Astronomers S George Djorgovski and Srinivas R Kulkarni of the California Institute of Technology in California, USA, reported that the gammaray burst detected in December 14, 1997, …
THE silicon chip may be no more if one American company has its way. Ball Semiconductor Inc (BSI) believes that in the future, silicon chips will be spherical. Microchips got their name because they are "chipped" off a flat silicon wafer upon which the circuits have been etched. But wafer …
LE BERNARDIN, a four-star restaurant in Manhattan, USA, serves caviar-topped oysters and salmon with truffle sauce. But what the hotel does not serve is their clients' popular choice the swordfish. A notice on the menu says that the restaurant is supporting a conservation campaign and will not serve swordfish in …
BEES may be busy, but are not always the avid shift workers that scientists have long presumed them to be. American entomologists have found that young honeybees work and rest at completely random times, unlike older, foraging bees, who have a distinct internal rhythm. They even get jet-lag if flown …
NAVASSA Island, one of the most isolated places off the coast of Haiti, have been found with more than 800 species of plants and animals. The tip of a sub-merged mountain, Navassa is located about 65 km west of Haiti and nearly 320 km from the mainland of the us. …
People with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) have a surprisingly active thymus, an organ at the base of the neck that sends out immune cells but winds down with age. Researchers assumed that anyone with HIV would have an inactive thymus due to attack by the virus and normal ageing. …
Brain scans confirm what smokers insist: cigarettes improve concentration. Elizabeth Quattrocki of the McLean Hospital in USA, asked four smokers not to smoke for 24 hours. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, she scanned the brains of these volunteers and four nonsmokers as they answered questions about some pictures. Both groups …
Plastic electronics is by now fairly common; polymer-based transis-tors and fabricated polymer light emitting diodes (LEDs). But now researchers in the US and the UK have reported integrating the two to develop an organic transistor. They are using it to drive a polymer-based LED which is built on top of …
