The 16th Birding Fair, starting at the scenic Man Sagar lake here this Friday, will be devoted to conservation of urban lakes which are getting extinct at an alarming rate because of lack of priority and inadequate administrative control in most of the cities. Ironically lakes are dying out at …
Biomedical research continues to use many more male subjects than females in both animal studies and human clinical trials. The unintended effect is to short-change women
New England fishermen have mixed feelings about a programme designed to allow overfished species to recover. Mark Schrope reports on how catch shares have scientists fishing for answers.
It hasn't always been easy to get the White House to lead on climate change, so for years the question of how to incorporate global warming into long-range planning and public infrastructure in the United States has fallen to cities, states and individual federal agencies. Now, the Obama administration is …
With no end in sight for the oil gushing from the explosion site at the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, anxious US officials are looking to researchers who study the Gulf of Mexico and its idiosyncratic currents to help determine where all the oil is and where it might be heading. …
As oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion, the question remains: how big an environmental disaster is this? Observing the surface slick and the deep-sea leak are of limited use in this situation. A more effective approach might be …
With oil still gushing from an offshore well in the Gulf of Mexico, some scientists and environmentalists worry that US federal agencies have not done enough to gather precious data on the spill, now into its second month.
A comparison of a recently published evidence-based map of the distribution of the Plasmodium falciparum malaria parasite with data from 1900, before the introduction of major malaria control measures, suggests that concerns that rising temperatures are a threat to malaria control efforts are misplaced. During a century when increases in …
The upper ocean acts as a giant heat sink and has absorbed the majority of excess energy generated by anthropogenic greenhouse gasses. This makes ocean heat content, potentially, a key indicator of climate change. But to be useful for evaluating the global energy balance and as a constraint on climate …
Malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum is a disease that is responsible for 880,000 deaths per year worldwide. Vaccine development has proved difficult and resistance has emerged for most antimalarial drugs. To discover new antimalarial chemotypes, we have used a phenotypic forward chemical genetic approach to assay 309,474 chemicals. Here we …
There are still nearly 250 million malaria cases reported annually, over 800,000 fatal, with most deaths being children under 5. The malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum is notoriously adept at developing drug resistance, and new drugs are urgently needed. Two reports raise hopes that alternatives to artemisinins might be found, by …
The upper ocean acts as a giant heat sink and has absorbed the majority of excess energy generated by anthropogenic greenhouse gasses. This makes ocean heat content, potentially, a key indicator of climate change. But to be useful for evaluating the global energy balance and as a constraint on climate …
There are still nearly 250 million malaria cases reported annually, over 800,000 fatal, with most deaths being children under 5. The malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum is notoriously adept at developing drug resistance, and new drugs are urgently needed. Two reports raise hopes that alternatives to artemisinins might be found, by …
The economist Paul Krugman suggested in his New York Times column earlier this month that the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico could provide the flagging environmental movement with the renewed impetus it so badly needs. The modern movement, he pointed out, gained a great deal of momentum …
An unlikely coalition of logging companies and environmental groups has reached an agreement to protect more than 300,000 square kilometres of Canadian boreal forest
Despite decades of research into drugs and vaccines for neglected diseases such as tuberculosis and dengue fever, few products have made it through clinical development and into the hands of the millions who desperately need them. One of the biggest hurdles is the sheer expense of running clinical trials, compared …
In 2007, a paper in the journal Cancer Cell announced that the compound dichloroacetate (DCA) had been found to shrink tumours in rats (S. Bonnet et al. Cancer Cell 11, 37
Reports that the geological record of erosion indicates a fourfold increase in global sedimentation rates during the past 5 million years merited a global explanation. Explanations offered include an increased rate of mountain formation and global cooling. Now Jane Willenbring and Friedhelm von Blanckenburg reanalyse original data sets and use …
