The World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Climate in Asia 2024 report warns that the region is warming nearly twice as fast as the global average, driving more extreme weather and posing serious threats to lives, ecosystems, and economies. In 2024, Asia experienced its warmest or second warmest year on …
I am not at all unhappy to see H D Deve Gowda go. The manner in which his coalition partner, the Congress, turned against him is, maybe, debatable. But his performance as a leader who should have thought of economic development as a holistic issue, taking environment, poverty and equity …
Teetotallers, who miss out the benefits of red wine need not lose heart. According to Normal Williams and his group from the Papworth Hospital near Cambridge, an alcohol-free powder of red wine is just as effective against heart disease by preventing the arteries from collecting deposits of the dangerous low …
the unique biological heritage of the Galapagos islands would soon disappear if illegal fishing continues in their waters. Commercial fishing fleets from mainland Ecuador, the us and the Far East continue to fish in the Galapagos marine reserve despite an official ban. According to Jack Grove, a fish biologist and …
Researchers from Brazil have just reported that skin flakes in the hair of children with dandruff provide a comfortable refuge for house-dust mites, which trigger allergic responses that can cause asthma. Charles Naspitz and his colleagues from the paediatrics department of Federal University of Sao Paulo have collected through a …
muynak, a small town lying about 1,000 km west of the Uzbek capital Tashkent, bears testimony to one of the worst ecological disasters in the world - the shrinking of the Aral Sea. Once a green, bustling seaport, it has been reduced to a salty desert. The leaders of five …
governments today manage a natural resource by first nationalising it and then creating a bureaucracy to handle it. But the method that was used in the past is precisely what all modern environmental economists are advocating, which is letting the people manage their natural resources and giving them the right …
the Silver Lake on the outskirts of Bitterfeld, a major industrial town in Saxony-Anhalt, gives proof of the extent of damage caused by polluting industries in the former eastern Germany. The water in the lake is shallow and filthy with no green vegetation growing near it. The ground around the …
with over 100 million people worldwide, who are officially certified by doctors as obese (body mass index of over 30), management of body weight is as much a nightmare for physicians as it is a challenge for medical scientists. The phenomenal ability of the human body to store fat, an …
An allocation of Rs 15.5 million has been made by the government of Sri Lanka to rehabilitate 93 minor irrigation projects in the Attanagalla electorate. A team of technical officers headed by the western provincial minister of irrigation, Sarath Keerthiratna, visited prospective areas in Attanagalla. He was surveying field canals …
On the Comptroller and Auditor General's (cag) report tabled in the Karnataka Assembly in 1996, which identified 10,888 polluting industries in the state (till March 1995): In 1992, some of the industries were exempted (from seeking environmental clearance), under the exempted category of non-polluting industries, which meant that we could …
bioindicators such as trees take note of many changes in the environment and will thus soon become valuable recorders of contamination, very convenient for environmental monitoring, reports D K Pandey et al of the Forest Research Institute, Dehra Dun, Uttar Pradesh. Tree bark remains in the environment for many years. …
another addition to the list of products harmful to the ozone layer is the Concorde, the supersonic aircraft. Research shows that the trail of invisible fog of sulphuric acid left by a Concorde may be depleting the ozone layer far faster than climatologists had expected. David Fahey of the us …
• Plants control air pollution by taking in carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) from the atmosphere and releasing oxygen. A peepal tree with a crown spread of 162 sq km releases 1,712 kg of oxygen and absorbs 2,252 kg of CO 2 per hour.• Trees not only mechanically stop smoke …
under unfavourable - oxygen-deprived - conditions, brine shrimps shut down their energy processes and enter a death-like state; but when favourable conditions are restored, perhaps years later, these animals rise up, hatch and swim away, says James Clegg, a biochemist at the University of California's Bodega Marine Laboratory in Bodega …
Twenty seven nation-members of the World Tourism Organisation in the Asia-Pacific region and several other government and non-governmental bodies ratified the Male Declaration at the Asia Pacific Tourism Minister's Conference in Maldives recently. The participants pledged to foster awareness for environmental ethics among consumers, conservation and sustainable use of natural …
in the us, they are clubbed under the curious heading of 'Life industry': giant transnational enterprises which buy, sell and control the market for bio-industrial products. These enterprises thrive on biological materials (plants, animals and microorganisms). From seeds and agrochemicals to pharmaceuticals and veterinary medicines, these corporate heavyweights cater to …
On the higher value model of watershed development advocated by him: Conventional watershed development models demand land and water resource development in an entire area which is classified as the watershed and does not discriminate between the land of the rich and the poor. But the higher value model of …
the way humankind has dealt with the environment has undergone numerous changes over the ages. The earliest civilisations revered the personifications of nature. This attitude changed over time and the environment is now used as a resource-base and a dumpyard. This metamorphosis, if one may call it so, has been …
The accelerators used in particle physics are huge machines with marry kilometres of tunnels. The cost and labour required for making and operating such accelerators is proving to be even beyond the multinational collaborations. One novel idea to reduce the size and consequent cost of accelerators is the plasma wake …
A recent archaeological find in this Latin American country has indicated that Asian migration had begun far earlier in the Americas than is currently presumed. The immigrants got to South America thousands of miles from Clovis in New Mexico - that is conventionally accepted as the oldest known in the …
