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. …
Comets are known to reside in a vast spherical halo called the Oort cloud, extending for about a light year beyond the orbit of Pluto. The forces responsible for their coming towards us are still not known. Now, John Matese and Daniel Whitmire of the University of Southwestern Louisiana, US …
melatonin, considered a miracle hormone that banishes illness and reverses ageing has attracted the attention of the public health policy makers in the us. A meeting on melatonin at the National Institute of Health, Bethesda, called for a multicentre clinical trial to determine melatonin's efficacy and safety ( jama , …
the first crop of wheat plants was recently harvested aboard Mir, the Russian space station, reports the us- based National Aeronautics and Space Administration ( nasa ). The plants which were grown through a complete life cycle, were a result of
a watered down compromise could be a possible outcome of the ongoing clash between the European Union (eu) and us over fur trade. The issue in contention involves an international agreement on humane trapping standards which eu would like to enforce and which us resists. eu has twice delayed imposing …
after three decades of painstaking research, a team of American researchers has at last been able to establish a direct link between smoking and lung cancer. Mikhail F Denissenko, Annie Pao, Moon-shong Tang and Gerd P Pfeifer have reported in Science (Vol 274, No 5286) the first direct evidence showing …
the much maligned chocolate can actually act as a powerful tool against heart attacks. Andrew L Waterhouse, Joseph R Shirley and Jennifer L Donovan from the department of viticulture and enology, University of California, Davis, us report that chocolate contains potent chemicals that neutralise substances directly implicated in coronary heart …
A recent study of yellow baboons suggests that environmental stress leads to infertility in them. In a season when food is scarce, conception rates are likely to halve. Scientists could correlate the environmental stress to low levels of progesterone in these primates. The study strongly suggests that reducing stress levels …
Trees contaminated by radioactivity from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster are to be burnt to produce electricity. Scientists from the us and Belarus are planning to construct a power plant fueled by timber from around the crippled reactor. Larry Baxter, a chemical engineer working in the area claims that more than …
saving electricity with energy-efficient compact fluorescent lamps (cfls) can cost as little as one-tenth of the investment needed to build new power plants that produce the same amount of energy, say scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (lbnl) in California, us. In the us, where lighting in rural and …
The world's most powerful computer will be on line in 1998. It will be 300 times faster than the ones in use now. It would take a person using a calculator 30,000 years to accomplish the work the new IBM supercomputer will perform in one second. The machine will assist …
Alcoholics are often heavy smokers too. The link has its roots in the brain, say researchers. Neuroscientists at the Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, US, have found that alcohol and nicotine, the chemical in tobacco, affect the same protein, the acetylcholine receptor molecule, on a brain cell. Experiments conducted …
Soon it may be possible to get resistance against a disease by simply eating a potato. A team headed by Charles Arntzen at the Boyce Thompson Institute of Plant Research in New York, US, has undertaken advanced research on a vaccine for diarrhoea, using raw potatoes. A gene introduced in …
there seems to be some consensus on the means of disposing excess plutonium, an issue which has plagued super powers like us. The us energy department will now encase about 50 tonnes of plutonium, a remnant of 50 years of cold war, in glass or ceramic blocks, which will be …
"florida Bay used to be full of sea grasses and corals, but now it is as good as a sewer pond,' observes Brian LaPointe, a marine biologist at Harbour Branch Oceanographic Institution in Fort Pierce, Florida. Chemicals from agricultural runoff have brought forth the transformation. LaPointe says that the dirty …
right after Bill Clinton announced his new cabinet on December 20, 1996, after his re-entry for a second term as the us President, the hardliner Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich called for a "truce' among the House members regarding new issues and policies. Although the us presidential campaign last November …
THE Habitat ii conference held in Istanbul, in June this year, had one message broadcast loud and clear: cities could be cleaned up and managed sustainably if only communities chose to do so. Twelve communities who have already demonstrated this were given the Best Practices Award by the UN. One …
A CONTROVERSY is raging between the ministry of environment and forests (MEF) and the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Dehradun, over the issue of bio- patents. While sources within the MEE believe that the WII has sold off India's bio-diversity to the US, officials at the institute vehemently deny the …
Among the successes recorded in the field of tissue engineering (the development of spare parts for the body), the growth of bones is one. "This is exciting because we have been mimicking the natural process of development," says A Hari Reddi, of the biology and orthopaedics department at the Johns …
