The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, an arm of the United Nations in Vienna, forecast the possible movement of the radioactive plume coming from crippled Japanese reactors. It shows the plumes churning across the Pacific, and touching the Aleutian Islands on Thursday before hitting Southern California late Friday. The projection …
Read DTE's latest coverage on Japan nuclear crisis: Nuclear fault lines run deep Author(s): Latha Jishnu Posted on: 1 April 2011 Blogs A tsunami of questions Author(s): Sunita Narain Posted on: 16 March 2011 Nuclear secrecy is a matter of concern Author(s): Richard Mahapatra Posted on: 16 March 2011 Japan's …
Earthquakes Nuclear Power Plants Shaky foundations July 31, 2008 Predicting earthquakes Nov 15, 2007 Shaky foundation April 15, 2006 Turn to nature March 15, 2005 If not now Jan 31, 2005 Lots of zeal and money Nov 30, 2004 Learning from the Gujarat quake June 15, 2003 Delhi is earthquake …
The current nuclear crisis in Japan is the most critical one after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Tracking it closely means a lot for India as it points out how a nuclear crisis is managed. It is important at a time when the world is getting obsessive with nuclear safety. …
A recent study by the Central Pollution Control Board has exonerated vehicles of being the worst polluters in Delhi and Mumbai. Instead, it has pinned down liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) as the biggest source of fine pollutants. Experts have contested the study, saying the findings are unsubstantiated and scientifically untenable. …
In January, about 300 people in the US suffered health problems from excessive consumption of energy drinks like Red Bull and Monster; most of them were children and teenagers, as per the American Association of Poison Control Centers. The association has recently started tracking the toxicity of energy drinks that …
The Union environment ministry, it seems, is not serious about dealing with plastic waste. While notifying the plastic waste management rules on February 7, it banned use of plastic in only gutkha, paan masala and tobacco sachets. No other form of plastic packaging has been banned by the Plastic Waste …
It is no mean task to find a moneylender for a financially risky project. More so, if it is a high-investment, low-return project under the ambitious Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission. The fact that government did not plan finance for a mission that aims to address the challenges of climate …
When the mobile phone was first launched about two decades ago, not many envisioned that such a bulky and expensive device would go on to become one of the world’s most indispensable modes of communication. But despite its omnipresence many people are still ignorant how it functions. Energy travels in …
Ideas and ideologies, images and reports of events, both minor and cataclysmic, fly on the Internet, swirling through cyberspace, gathering resonance, metamorphosing and touching millions of lives in different ways. Many of the ideas—and visuals—could be banal (as they very often are), some dangerous, others bringing promise of change. Some …
Our world is increasingly held together by the network of digital communications networks we call the Internet. Business, government, politics, science and the arts have all been fundamentally transformed by the fact that everyone’s connected to everyone else, everywhere, and no one needs to get permission to collaborate, trade, or …
TWO recent studies have clinched enough empirical data to repudiate any climate change sceptic. For the first time, the studies have pinned down greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for frequent extreme weather events like rainfall and floods. In one study, UK and Switzerland researchers analysed one of the worst floods in …
CHILDREN and adolescents injected with a swine flu vaccine could be at an increased risk of a sleeping disorder, warned a study. Made by multinational pharma firm GlaxoSmithKline, Pandemrix vaccine was used in 47 countries, including India, during the swine flu outbreak in 2009-10. Finland’s National Institute for Health and …
IMAGINE a hill station without pines. Worse, Canada sans the maple tree. This could be a reality. Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel claim many tree species that depend on the wind to disperse their seeds like pines and maple might become extinct due to climate change. …
CHILDREN who attain puberty early may have less chances of getting osteoporosis later in life. This information may help Indians take precautionary steps, as one in every three women above 45 years has osteoporosis, a survey conducted by Arthritis Foundation of India states. Statistics with the International Osteoporosis Foundation shows …
TOWARDS the end of the last Ice Age, 10,000-20,000 years ago, the global ocean circulation underwent a lot of changes. This circulation, called meridional overturning circulation (MOC), carries warm, saline surface water north to cooler regions. Now researchers from Cardiff University in the UK have revealed how the MOC in …
SUPERCONDUCTIVITY was discovered nearly a century ago and is used in MRI scans and Maglev trains. But materials behave as superconductors at extremely low temperatures (-250°C and below). This limits the use of superconductors because the process of cooling is cumbersome and costly. Usually liquid helium is used to obtain …
It was quarter to nine on a cold December evening at the Kalighat tram depot in south Kolkata. A row of tramcars stood like ghosts under an iron shed. At the corner of one coach an elderly man clad in khakis read the newspaper in the dim light of a …
Thandai used to be a popular drink at Agyawanti’s maternal home. But when she came to village Chaina in Faridkot district of Punjab after marriage, she discovered that tea was the chosen drink. Then, last year she was asked to make thandai at a food festival in her village. “It …
Call it the fallout of seven years of severe drought or government inaction, a silent revolution is brewing in Lalitpur district of Uttar Pradesh. Communities are getting united and digging channels to bring water from government canals to their fields. Some are volunteering labour, while those belonging to Scheduled castes …
