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. …
THE long-standing enmity between Cuba and the us has taken a bizarre turn with Cuba accusing the us government at the UN of waging a "biological attack" against it by introducing a plague of tiny, juice-sucking bugs that are now reportedly wreaking havoc on crops in three of its provinces. …
Satellite data has revealed that temperatures in the polar regions of both northern and southern hemispheres fluctuate markedly with the waxing and waning of the Moon. According to John Shaffer and his colleagues at the Department of [ogy at Arizona State University in rempe, average temperatures in the Axtic and …
OCEANOGRAPHERS had found evidence that the march of ice ages over the last million years was paced by the cyclical stretching and squeezing of earth's orbit around the sun, which would have altered the way sunlight fell on the planet's surface. But in 1988, researchers scuba diving in Nevada's Devils …
A recently discovered drug molecule can force the body to burn off calories without too much exercise. This molecule called CP-331679, which essentially mimics the action of a hormone called adrenaline, can boost the metabolism of rats by almost a third, without increasing their appetite. Announcing this at the American …
The bacteria which infiltrate the pocket between the gums and the base of the teeth, making gums bleed, ultimately resulting in the falling of teeth may well be making hearts fail as well. According to a recent study conducted in a group of 1,372 Puma Indians in Arizona, those with …
AN INVENTION at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, us, promises to mitigate the potentially deadly effects of the bacteria Eschcrichia coli. Every year, the toxic E coli kills as many as 200 people in the us alone by causing intense intestinal distress, severe dehydration and internal bleeding, and in serious …
FOR the first time sharks may have to play the role of lifeguards for humans. An extract from shark tissues will be tested on cancer patients later this year. The extract, called squalamine, could help in cutting the blood supply of the tumours. The extract was discovered in the stomach …
CONTRARY to the conventional wisdom that prevention is better than cure, here is a case where cure certainly outweighs the benefits of preventive measures. According to a study done at the Department of Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, us, 70 per cent of the overall decline in deaths in …
The state of Virginia is going to sue the US government demanding US $1.5 million as its share ofthe money spent so far and for future expenses required for cleaning up the pollution caused by a rayon fibre factory. The state has alleged that the federal government was aware of …
Question: What is the cost of the ecosystem services which nature offers us? Answer: A whopping us $16-54 trillion! This figure has been arrived at with the concerted efforts of 13 ecologists, economists and geographers who reported their finding in a recent issue of Nature. Remarked Robert Costanza, an ecological …
RESEARCHERS from the Albany Medical Centre (AMC) in New York, have devised a new technique which will lead to a blood type that would be compatible with all blood types. They have developed a process to coat red blood cells with a polymer called polyethylene glycol, or PEG, that would …
a foreign army of 60 snout beetles was recently released into three marked plots of the Everglades in Florida. Their job is to arrest the expansion of melaleuca, a tree used for landscaping and to control erosion, that was first brought to the us at the turn of the century. …
Stephen Flock of the University of Arkansas, in the US, and his team has developed a new laser device, which is helping doctors and nurses give injections to patients. This will not only render the process pain-free, but will also reduce the risks associated with discarded needles. This hand-held device …
Until now pregnant women were under the misconception that if they had morning sickness, they were less prone to a miscarriage. Kathleen O'Conner of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, says that morning sickness is simply more frequent in younger women. She randomly selected 708 married women (age 18-47 years) in …
A spy plane that can scrutinise a country the size of Switzerland in two days from an attitude of 19,760m has been unveiled by the US Defence Department. Pentagon chiefs say it is likely to be used above the reach of enemy craft to guide a low-attitude unmanned spy plane, …
S R Manalis and his colleagues at the Stanford University, in the US, have reported the fabrication of a new type of cantilever which uses optical deflection and is extremely sensitive. A movable grating is used to diffract a laser beam which is then detected by a photodiode. The basic …
oceanographers in the us have successfully tested a new approach called real- time oceanography or adaptive sampling, which gives them a better picture of water movements and enables them to modify their plans midway through an experiment to follow a clue suggested by new data. The new technology could be …
A federal court in North Carolina, US, recently passed a landmark judgement related to smoking when it ruled that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) can regulate sales and labelling on cigarettes. The court, however, said that FDA cannot control the promotion and advertising of tobacco products. The ruling would …
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, US, recently launched a new weather satellite GOES-K to gear up for the busy Atlantic hurricane season. The National Weather Service (NWS) now relies on two geostationary operational environmental satellites for forecasting: GOES-8 for the east coast and GOES-9 for the west. But both …
The great smog disasters of the past have made clear that air pollution can kill people in a matter of days: extremely high concentrations of air pollution building up under conditions of low wind speed and stable atmospheric conditions have been associated with excess deaths in the Meuse Valley, Belgium …
