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. …
A REPORT presented in mid-July by the Institute for Environment and Health (mii), Leicester, United Kingdom, has hit hard especially those living in the northern hemisphere. It makes a startling statement that 60,000 human-made chemicals are likely to be causing not only impotency among men and wildlife, but might actually …
WHILE localised prostate cancer is not fatal, its metastatic spread - occurrence or development of secondary foci of cancer at a distance from the primary site - is invariably fatal. Researchers have long been plagued by the question - what dictates molecular changes in metastatic prostate cancer making it life-threatening? …
THERE are a variety of ways in which the North could support development in and by the South. I sometimes refer to them as the "AT&T-; mechanisms": aid, trade and technology transfer. All of these have been on the Northern agenda for decades now. The United Nations Conference on Environment …
SOS: AIDs, a play being staged in Bombay by Spotlight, a group of concerned theatre professionals, gets across the " .. message: AIDS IS not Just a disease that happens to someone else. It can happen to you. And as there is no cure, it is pretty obvious that vigilance …
The Platform for Action is an agenda for women’s empowerment. It aims at accelerating the implementation of the Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women and at removing all the obstacles to women’s active participation in all spheres of public and private life through a full and equal share …
WHAT do you think would happen if someone were to discover, god forbid, that either of the 2 Homo sapiens sexes is biologically more gifted than other? Ever since Mary Wollstonecraft laid the foundation of feminism -- as we know it today -- late last century and right through suffragetism …
Complex Women had more activity in the cingulate gyrus, an evolutionarily recent region that controls complex expressions of emotions, such as showing anger by looks, not punches Simple Men had more activity in their temporal limbic system. This evolutionarily ancient region controls emotions linked to action, especially aggression
WOMEN • Women perform better than men on tests of perceptual speed -- in which subjects must rapidly identify matching items, such as pairing a picture with its twin in a given set of photos. • Women can remember if an object or series of objects have been displaced, or …
The human instinct and obsession to explore, and discover in all ways, shaped the world we know. Humans have visited virtually every desolate face on the face of Earth, have lifted off the planet to walk on the moon, and continue to inspect the solar system and the limitless reaches …
ANYONE even vaguely familiar with equations of physics, would recall the universal gravitational constant, denoted by the letter G. Besides G, there are several other physical quantities which govern the strength of interactions between the elementary particles of matter and are 'deemed to have a fixed value. These are generally …
SCIENTISTS have now found a way to render "killer" malaria viruses impotent. Researchers based in the Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford University and other research bodies in the us have identified a family of genes which are thought to be responsible for people dying from the disease. There are …
GENETIC information is extremely precious and insurance companies should not be allowed a free-hand with them: this is the opinion of mps who form the Science and Technology Committee in UK's House of Commons. So far, the insurance firms have been treating the issue of genetic testing with "undue complacency", …
AFTER holding up obstinately Lrgainst a volley of criticism for 3 long months, the Russian government has finally buckled down and scrapped its plans of introducing a law which would require foreign visitors staying in Russia for more than 3 months to undergo a compulsory screening for the HIV virus. …
A whole issue of the journal Annals ofMathematics is to be devoted to a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, arguably the most famous of mathematical problems (Science, Vol 268, No 5214). The proof, first announced by Princeton mathematician Andrew Wiles about 2 years ago, is now corrected and all the …
THERE is good news for heart patients requiring bypass surgery on the aorta, the main artery which carries oxygenated blood from the heart to the rest of the body. British researchers have recently developed a technique that uses plastic tubes, called catheters, to insert synthetic grafts into the blood vessel, …
It is normal for people in many countries to build their own houses, especially among the poor. Now, a British architect, Walter Segal, has developed a timber-frame building system based on off-the-shelf materials, with a minimum of cutting, and a simple sequence of step by step operations (Appropriate Technology, Vol …
Famine stares Africa in the face. And this time the situation is particularly bad because donor nations have severely slashed their aid programmes, says a special report prepared by the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Thanks to a devastating drought, grain production in southern Africa had fallen by …
BLACK holes provide an excellent laboratory to test the theories of astrophysics and gravity. There is, however, one small hitch: it is not possible to "see" a black hole because its high gravity doesn't let light produced inside it to come out. A group of researchers has now come closest …
A TRAGEDY of Indian planners as also of those from some other developing countries is that they have considered agricultural development synonymous with rural development. Development is a must for alleviation of rural poverty, but ironically, conventional development pro- grammes have exacerbated the pressures on the rural poor and unwittingly …
Too wide a net The world's fishing industry is on self-destructive overdrive and countries are belligerently marking out marine territory KAVITA CHARANJI TOO many boats chasing too few fish. That's the story being replayed with increasing frustration in the world's major oceans. In the North Pacific, triggerhappy fishermen competing for …
