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. …
US PRESIDENT Bill Clinton was right when he predicted not everyone would be pleased with his solution to the timber crisis in the northwestern states (Down To Earth, May 31, 1993). Both environmentalists and timber workers are up in arms against his proposal, which calls for reducing logging to 25 …
EVEN AS the midwestern states in USA are awash with flood waters, farmers in the southeast are contending with a severe drought and face agricultural losses that have already hit $800 million in the Carolinas and Georgia. US department of agriculture authorities say the worst-hit crops in the tri-state area, …
UNLESS some last-minute glitches sour the deal, the new year will unite Canada, the US and Mexico in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the world's largest free-trade zone with about 370 potential consumers and a combined gross national product of more than $6,400 billion. Not only does NAFTA …
WITH PREDICTIONS by World Health Organisation officials that 40 million people will be infected by HIV by 2000 and six million of them will go on to contract AIDS and die, a cure for the disease holds out promise for vast profits -- and the Australians, at least, are determined …
CULTS are dangerous and the world has never been free of them. But they are not all necessarily religious in nature. The latest in the bandwagon is the herbal cult The herbal cult was born in America -- aren't they all? -- out of a call to return to one's …
MALE HOMOSEXUALITY seems to run in the family and the trait is passed on by the mother, according to US researchers. Dean Hamer and his colleagues at the US National Cancer Institute interviewed 76 homosexuals and found 13.5 per cent of the brothers of these gay men were homosexual too. …
A FAT-RICH diet, widely believed to be unhealthy, acts as an elixir for the Japanese, the world's longest-living people, claim old-age researchers. Before World War II, the lifespan of the Japanese was the lowest in the developed world. "Our cholesterol (counts) used to be very low," says Takao Suzuki, director …
ALASKAN authorities seeking to rebuild the state's dwindling caribou herds have decided to allow airborne slaying of wolves to the extent that their population is halved. But beset by protests by US wildlife enthusiasts, such as the New York-based Fund for Animals, the helicopter proposal has been temporarily grounded. The …
UKRAINE might ratify the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), but it must be accorded special status as a "transition country" -- one with nuclear armaments on its territory that are in the process of being destroyed, says defence minister Konstantin Morozov. Western experts rate Morozov's offer as a bid to find …
LINKING together individual molecules to make complicated structures, much in the same way as children playing with Lego, chemists are now trying to construct materials whose properties they can fix beforehand. At least half a dozen groups in USA, Canada, Europe and Australia are assembling large arrays of molecules to …
WITH US unemployment remaining steady at an unhappy 7 per cent, the only consolation that President Bill Clinton had to offer Americans is that the Japanese are finally experiencing the same problem. In an effort to counter the joblessness that is troubling the world's largest economies, Clinton proposed a global …
THE KARNATAKA Rajya Raitha Sangha (KRRS), which recently destroyed a processing unit of multinational Cargill Seeds, has lent strong support to a broad-based campaign against a plant set up in collaboration with W R Grace & Co of USA to produce a biopesticide from neem seeds. KRRS and several other …
THE PERSONAL computer on your desk could soon be processing data at 10 times its present speed following the introduction of the most advanced microprocessor chip for PCs yet -- the Pentium, made by Intel Corp of USA (New Scientist, Vol 138, No 1873). The Pentium, also one of the …
A tree testifying against a murder suspect? But that's exactly what happened recently in the US -- a "genetic fingerprint" from two seedpods found in the suspect's truck was found to be identical to that of a paloverde tree at the site of the murder (Science, Vol 260, No 5110). …
PAKISTAN plans to expand the controversial uranium enrichment plant at Kahuta near Islamabad to provide fuel for a nuclear power reactor being bought from China, according to senior government officials. Abdul Qader Khan, director of the research laboratories at Kahuta, said, "We believe that by the time we have the …
WITH TOBACCO generating nearly $196 million annually just for fourth-ranked Virginia, the effect of smoking on lungs abroad is best ignored. Thousands of jobs in Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee depend on tobacco, including 10,000 at the giant Philip Morris factory in Richmond. Besides, federal price supports ensure an …
IS THERE a tenth planet in our solar system? Astronomers who have observed Uranus and Neptune deviate from their calculated orbits, attribute such irregularities to the gravitational pull of an unknown planet, usually referred to as Planet X (Nature, Vol 363, No 6424). But Myles Standish of the Jet Propulsion …
LIFE IMITATES art more than art imitates life, said Oscar Wilde. His statement was borne out recently when US scientists re-enacted in their laboratory the plot of Steven Spielberg's latest film, Jurassic Park, which shows dinosaurs being re-created from their DNA, procured from the blood sucked by mosquitoes and preserved …
A SERIOUS error acknowledged recently by AIDS researchers at USA's prestigious Harvard Medical School is being cited as an example of what can happen when scientists rush into clinical trials pleading that the urgency of their work excuses corner-cutting. In the Harvard incident, field trials were held nationally, based on …
