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 American tobacco industry has hit back with a vengeance. Following President Clinton's announcement of wide ranging restrictions on cigarette advertising (Down To Earth, Vol 5, No 8), the industry has vowed to take the battle to the courts. And what is more, the White House has been forced to …
an unusual problem has arisen off the coasts of us . It has do with the clean-up of lakes in and around the country, to get rid of waste that has led to a depletion of a certain variety of fish stock. For years, environmentalists have advocated the cleaning up …
a team of scientists from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre in Dallas have taken the first, albeit small steps towards making the impossible a reality. Yes, a man may be able to father a child even in his 100th year or …
J J Wiseman and P T P Ho of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Massachusetts, US, have reported the presence of a remarkable system of filaments of molecular gas behind the Great Nebula of the Orion constellation; this constellation is one of the most studied star formation regions in space. …
in spite of tremendous advancements in the technology of seismological tools, the deepest interior of the earth has remained inaccessible to geophysicists. So, when a team of seismologists led by Xiao Dong Song and Paul Richards of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, New York, us , announced …
US tobacco companies are gearing up to fight a ruling which awarded US $750,000 in damages to a lung cancer patient Grady Carter who smoked for more than 40 years. A six-member jury in Jacksonville, Florida recently passed the verdict against American Tobacco whose cigarettes were smoked by Carter. Until …
The killing fields would never be the same again, thanks to the new-age mine detonating sensors, developed by Omnitech Robotics of Colorado, US. Rollers of a M60A3 Panther tank are fitted with high power sensors to detect an embedded mine from as far as 500 m away, a safe distance …
The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently ruled that insurance companies in the US were not required to reveal blood test results which are used by them to determine the coverage eligibility. The federal court gave the verdict on a lawsuit brought by a widow who argued …
nanometre-sized molecular materials hold great promise for future generation devices. These materials could serve as building blocks of electronic devices of an amazingly small size or could even form the basis for self-assembling machines. But before all that, it is essential to understand the fundamental electrical and mechanical properties of …
Geologists at Stanford University in the US have predicted that the next earthquake that hits the San Francisco bay area could be more devastating than the one that occurred in 1868. Working on the rupture patterns of the Hayward fault
in the ongoing saga of unravelling the mysteries of the universe, the latest pictures sent by the Hubble space telescope opens a new chapter on how galaxies are possibly born. The new images show what, according to astronomers, may be galaxies being formed in the early universe out of a …
Proctor and Gamble Company is developing a method that it hopes will lead to the largescale and rapid composting of most non-recyclable solid wastes. Its researchers at the Winton Hill Technical Centre in Cincinnati, US, believe that factors like temperature and aeration have a great impact on the process underlying …
The archaeon M jannaschii was originally isolated in 1983 by John Leigh (then at the University of Illinois; now at the University of Washington) from a sample collected from the hydrothermal vent 2,600 metres below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, approximately 100 miles south of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. …
factory trawlers operating in the north Pacific seem to be in the eye of a storm generated by Greenpeace activists in the us . The Seattle-based fleet of floating fish factories is allegedly pushing fish stocks off Alaska's shores. The port of Seattle police arrested 11 people after Greenpeace protesters …
scientists from the University of Miami in Florida, us, have concluded that it is a toxin secreted from red tide which has caused a record number of deaths among manatees (sirenian mammals belonging to the genus Trichechus , found in the waters of the Atlantic and adjacent rivers) in Florida …
there seems to be more bad news pertaining to the ozone layer. The growing ozone hole has allowed for a cooler stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere 10-50 km above the Earth. Scientists led by Ramaswamy Venkatachalam from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the us, measured temperatures and …
A presidential announcement has probably dealt the American tobacco industry its biggest blow till date: in a declaration aimed at providing some long-term relief to the millions reeling from tobacco-induced health disorders, Bill Clinton drastically curtailed tobacco companies' rights to advertise their products. This follows a recent FDA proclamation that …
