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. …
SOFTWARE that allows airline pilots to calculate their takeoff speed more accurately should increase safety margins in aborted takeoffs and also cut maintenance costs. The speed at which a plane can lift itself off the runway, known as vl, has to be calculated from the various flight characteristics of the …
AT FIRST glance, nothing seems wrong or extraordinary about the toy car that zips around Jeff Bloomquist's lab at University of Washington, USA. But when you look closer, you find the oddity: tied to a small bloom that juts like a bowsprit from the front of the car is a …
MUCH evidence in recent years has proved what folk wisdom and traditional medicinal practices had long believed. Our immune, nervous and hormonal systems are all linked. A number of studies with viral and bacterial agents have shown that the degree of infection can be modulated by interactions between these three …
Fuel cells have been around for decades. Now, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto, California, USA, has developed new fuel cells of the size of a gas furnace, which look like a main-frame computer. According to the EPRI, the cells will supply electricity to homes for !ess …
A distributed computer built from 68 personal computers has been found to be one of the 500 fastest computers in the world. The Avalon computer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA, costs a mere US $150,000 to build and can handle more than 20 billion operations per second. It …
TWO Fox TV reporters in Tampa, Florida, have reported that Monsanto's gene-tically engineered milk hormone, rBGH (recombinant bovine growth hor-mone), may promote cancer in humans. The milk is sold to dairy farmers, who inject it into their cows every two weeks to increase milk production. Monsanto and other organisations have …
THAILAND is all set to drag the us government to the dispute settlement panel of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) for letting Rice Tec, the Texas-based seed company, use the name "jasmati" as a trademark for selling a variety of rice. The US company perhaps wants to mislead consumers into …
THIRTY nine men have died so far after taking the anti-impotency drug Viagra, confirms the us Food and Drug Administration (PDA). About 85 per cent of the patients were found to have one or more risk factors related to coronary artery disease. Almost half the victims died within three hours …
The Asian longhorn beetle has been spotted in the northern areas of Chicago in the US. The state and the federal governments are planning to fell a substantial number of hardwood trees in order to contain the spread of the tree-devouring Chinese beetle. The beetle was found only once before …
TROPICAL forests have been disappearing at alarming rates for the past three decades. Farmers, ranchers and timber industries have denuded millions of acres, and only in the past few years has the resultant damage to the ecosystem has become agonisingly clear. A new study by botanists at the University of …
It is our passage to billions of light-years into space. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey's electronic camera, mounted on a 2.5-metre telescope in New Mexico, USA, captured its first images of stars, galaxies and quasars on the nights of May 9 and 10. Merely one per cent of the data …
Pierre Sikivie, physicist at the University of Florida in Gainsville, USA, says that rings of invisible matter are spreading out from the centre of our Galaxy like ripples on a pond. The last of these passed the Sun about 900 million years ago, and the next is due in 350 …
NEUTRON stars are rapidly rotating stars composed predominantly of closely packed neutrons. They emit rapid, regular pulses of radiation (usually at radio frequencies, and are known as pulsars). Since 1967, when the first pulsar was discovered accidentally, a lot of research has gone into neutron stars. One of the several …
THE us Navy, oil industry and telecommunication giants are trying hard to take the Law of the Sea Treaty out of the 'deep freeze' as the nation is still to ratify it. The deadline for ratifying the treaty, an international agreement on regulating commerce, navigation and exploration on and beneath …
PARTICLE physics is a peculiar field. The theoretical consistency of various models predicts the existence of several particles which have to exist to make the theory work. Some of them can be seen, but some remain elusive. Magnetic monopoles (a single electric charge having a spherically symmetrical field) belong to …
The US Food and Drug Administration (PDA) has approved rifapentine (Priftin) - the first new antituberculosis (anti-TB) drug to be licensed in 25 years. Rifapentine is indicated for pulmonary tuberculo-sis but must be used in conjunction with other anti-TB drugs. It is expected to increase patient compli-ance because it has …
New evidence suggests that those who look on the bright sides of things live healthier and longer than their gloom-and-doom counterparts. For years, research has shown that optimists weather coronary bypass surgeries better and also live longer with HIV, the dreaded acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) virus . But optimism not …
FARMERS in the us are having a hard time as they have lost million of dollars following a catastrophic drought. According to reports, the blistering heat has killed more than 130 people across the southern parts of the us. The heat wave shows no sign of abating and the impact …
A programmer at Sandia National Laboratories in California has recently patented a machine that can mend holes in the road auto-matically. About the size of a single-decker bus, the Rapid Road Repair Vehicle, as it is called, scans the road using an array of sensors on its bumpers. When it …
Common garden earthworms ooze nitrous oxide, commonly known as laughing gas. As a greenhous gas, these exhalations could contribute to global warming, German researchers warned the recently-concluded meeting of the American Society of Microbiology in Atlanta, USA. Carola Matthies and her col-leagues from the University of Bayreuth in Germany were …
