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. …
IT SEEMS hard to believe, but the noiseless sport of paragliding can lead to avalanches and landslides. Swiss researchers found paragliders scare mountain goats into the forests downhill. The hungry goats can do a lot of damage to these forests, the main protection against avalanches and landslides in many areas, …
If you're worried about your heart, there's good news and bad. First the good: there is strong evidence to support the theory that a couple of beers or glasses of wine daily help to prevent coronary heart disease. Now, the bad part: most heart attacks occur at dawn. Researchers at …
YOUR SALIVA may give a clue to your personality, says James M Dabbs, professor of psychology at Georgia State University in the US. Dabbs is trying to establish whether a relationship exists between the levels of testosterone in saliva samples and human behaviour. Dabbs has collected about 2,500 saliva samples …
SCIENTISTS at Princeton University in the US have achieved initial success in an attempt to produce energy from the fusion of hydrogen atoms. The physicists heated hydrogen to 20 times the temperature of the core of the sun to produce a burst of energy equivalent to 3 million watts (MW) …
• US computer software companies are in a state of shock over an announcement by Compton's New Media, a small US company, that it has been granted a patent on computer systems that retrieve information from multimedia databases. Several industry groups intend to contest the claim in court and say …
CHINA and the US have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to enforce the UN ban on drift-net fishing in the North Pacific. The MOU is the first of its kind since the ban came into force on January 1, 1993. China has agreed to allow the US coast guard …
THE US defence department plans to spend millions of dollars to buy new vaccines to inoculate troops against germ warfare and develop new bombs to incinerate chemical and biological weapon stocks. This is part of a major effort to protect US troops from poison gas, biological agents and nuclear weapons. …
Imagine a gear only three hairs wide. Difficult? Not for Paul Christensen, president of Potomac Photonics Inc of Maryland, USA, who carved a miniscule gear into a flat diamond surface using a laser (Science, Vol 261, No 5129). The gear is about 300 microns (three hair-widths) across with a dozen …
THE US is slowly coming to grips with one of its biggest environmental hazards: excessive car emissions. From 1994, under the 1990 Clean Air Act, companies with more than 100 employees are legally responsible for the pollution their employees' cars create. Many companies are, therefore, giving employees incentives to cut …
SEVEN astronauts returned to earth on December 13, 1993, after completing an unusual job: Rectifying a defective mirror on the Hubble space telescope. The $1.6-billion telescope was launched in 1990 with a defective mirror that prevented it from focussing on remote objects of the universe. The astronauts installed 11 new …
Canine distemper virus (CDV) infection occurred in captive leopards (Panthera pardus), tigers (Panthera tigris), lions (Panthera leo), and a jaguar (Panthera onca) in 1991 and 1992. An epizootic affected all 4 types of cats at the Wildlife Waystation, San Fernando, California, with 17 mortalities. CDV-infected raccoons were thought to be …
BANGLADESH'S Grameen Bank -- a cooperative banking system with easy loan repayment conditions -- has inspired US President Bill Clinton. When he was governor of Arkansas, Clinton launched the Goodfaith Fund, modelled after Grameen. Now, he plans to launch a similar scheme on a national level to extend lending to …
IF YOU are reluctant to leave bed on a dark, winter morning, stay right in there. People who wake up early in winters might be cutting short their required sleep, inviting unforeseen health problems (New Scientist, Vol 140, No 1899). Researchers say the natural sleeping patterns of humans are strikingly …
OIL-EATING bacteria, useful in cleaning up slicks, will soon have water wings, helping to keep them afloat in water. Using gene-splicing techniques, researchers at the University of Massachusetts, USA, have isolated 13 genes responsible for producing air-filled sacs in a floating bacterium called Halobacterium halobium. This comes in the wake …
SUSPECT diabetes? Get your eyes checked! A US company has developed a technique that uses eyes as a mirror for quickly and painlessly detecting diabetes, instead of the standard blood test for a patient's glucose level. In this technique, a blue light focused on the lens of the eye enables …
THE CREDIBILITY of China's controversial Three Gorges project to build the world's largest dam across the Yangtze river has received a setback. Two US government agencies -- the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers -- said they will sever their involvement in the project after completing work …
The Union government's department of science and technology (DST) and the Madras-based Central Leather Research Institute (CLRI) held a show to demonstrate the country's skills and capabilities in leather processing technologies. The planned highlight was a 9-hour satellite-linked, video conference of leather producers and technologists from India, the United States, …
If there is one thing a mouse cannot stand, it is the smell of other mice. Male mice with high levels of testosterone -- a male sex hormone -- mark their territories by secreting an oil in their urine, which scares off other mice. Scientists at Indiana University in the …
WITH THE passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the US House of Representatives and Senate, US President Bill Clinton has scored a major victory. However, to ensure approval of the agreement, which will gradually eliminate almost all trade and investment restrictions between the US, Canada and …
AFTER much dithering, Russia has joined Europe, Canada and Japan in the US-led international space station project. Russia will merge its Mir programme with the US Freedom programme for the project, the first of its kind. Orbiting where Russia's Mir 1 is currently deployed, the project will consist of the …
