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. …
life existed on Earth 350 million years earlier than everyone predicted, says a researcher in California, us. It was a time when the planet was still being bombarded by meteors. Gustaf Arrhenius of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, us, claims that 3.85 billion-year-old rocks from Greenland contained …
Volcanic eruptions normally release molten lava, water vapour and hot gases. But the Galeras volcano in Colombia is one with a difference. It spits out gold dissolved in its dense mix of gases; this gold melts out as magma from crustal rocks hundreds of miles beneath the surface. Fraser Goff, …
Comets are known to reside in a vast spherical halo called the Oort cloud, extending for about a light year beyond the orbit of Pluto. The forces responsible for their coming towards us are still not known. Now, John Matese and Daniel Whitmire of the University of Southwestern Louisiana, US …
The proposed lead-free petrol programme of Sri Lanka's central environmental authority (CEA) to check air pollution, especially in Colombo, has been postponed. According to official sources, the decision has been taken by the CEA, apparently due to inadequate storage tanks. Earlier, the CEA itself had announced in the cities that …
after the Americans, the French have followed suit. Recently, families of two lung cancer victims filed separate lawsuits against seita, the company that makes France's most famous brands of cigarettes. They have charged the company with inadequately warning consumers about the relation between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. It is …
promoting non-chlorofluorocarbon (cfc) refrigerators worldwide, to ensure the safety of the ozone layer, is having an unfortunate fallout. Immunisation programmes which involve the use of vaccines have been on a shaky ground ever since the global programme to switch over to cfc-free refrigeration began according to a recent report of …
after three decades of painstaking research, a team of American researchers has at last been able to establish a direct link between smoking and lung cancer. Mikhail F Denissenko, Annie Pao, Moon-shong Tang and Gerd P Pfeifer have reported in Science (Vol 274, No 5286) the first direct evidence showing …
the much maligned chocolate can actually act as a powerful tool against heart attacks. Andrew L Waterhouse, Joseph R Shirley and Jennifer L Donovan from the department of viticulture and enology, University of California, Davis, us report that chocolate contains potent chemicals that neutralise substances directly implicated in coronary heart …
Scientists attending the recent Annual Congress of European Society of Cardiology in Birmingham, UK, believe that the Chlamydia pneumoniae and Helicobacter pylori bacteria can cause heart attacks. People with coronary artery disease were observed having high levels of antibodies to these bacteria in their blood. The inflammation caused by the …
Alcoholics are often heavy smokers too. The link has its roots in the brain, say researchers. Neuroscientists at the Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, US, have found that alcohol and nicotine, the chemical in tobacco, affect the same protein, the acetylcholine receptor molecule, on a brain cell. Experiments conducted …
The AIDS management programme in Bangladesh should have a four-pronged methodology, according to the UN body on AIDS (UNAIDS). With the situation becoming more alarming, UNAIDS has suggested that a national AIDS policy be framed followed by a national AIDS awareness programme. The third step will require the ministry of …
it was a troika of human species which inhabited the expanse of earth, together, as recently as 30,000 years ago. New research findings suggest that Homo sapiens, Homo erectus and Neanderthals did not occupy different rungs of the ladder of evolution as was believed; instead, they could have coexisted. Led …
This paper attempts to present the linkages between irrigated agriculture, human health and the environment based on a review of data available from Sri Lanka.
GOVERNMENTS the world over can do just that - pat themselves on their backs - for work well done. Dutch scientists, reviewing a year of the international ban on ozone- destroying chemicals have estimated that a total of 1.5 million possible skin cancer cases have been averted in the us …
Cytocell, a biotech firm from Oxfordshire, UK, has developed a simple, safe and reliable test that uses foetal blood cells that leak through the placenta into the mother's circulation, to detect genetic abnormalities. The technique may eventually replace amniocentesis, which presents a one-in-200 chance of a miscarriage. But the test …
Scientists from the University of Pretoria in South Africa have developed a new, non-toxic, cryopreservant liquid that would make possible the preservation of organs at very low temperatures. Efforts at doing so had been frustrated till now because extreme cold damages cell membranes beyond repair. The researchers have just resuscitated …
FIFTYNINE-year-old Paul Jernigan and a 39-year old lady have, become the first- ever 'virtual' couple. They were selected to be part of an ambitious, us $1.4-million- project called the Visible Human Project, supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, us. The two offered their bodies for …
A recent report prepared by the University of Indonesia predicts that almost 12,000 to 3 1,000 people in the country will die of AIDS by the turn of the century. A poor medical surveillance system and resistance to use of contraceptives are aggravating the situation. There are conflicting reports about …
