The Ganga has been flowing for thousands of years. It is an inextricable part of India’s physical and cultural landscape. The land around it has changed beyond recognition over the millennia, but the river has remained the one great constant. It is believed to have healing powers, and to be cremated on its banks is said to bring salvation from the cycle of rebirth. Many believe that it is one of the country’s eternal verities. But climate scientists have another opinion. The Ganga, says a scientific report, is drying up. It’s a terrifying thought but it could become reality if the planet keeps heating up. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its 2007 report, says the Himalayan glaciers are melting at 10 to 12 metres a year, three times faster than 200 years ago, quicker than in other parts of the world. The grimmest scenario has them disappearing by 2035. If that happens, perennial rivers like the Ganga, China’s Yellow River and Yangtze will see a sharp fall in water level. Worse, they could become seasonal rivers. Until now, Himalayan glaciers were an inexhaustible reserve for the great rivers that flow through the Asian continent: […]
In many countries one of the side effects of the second world war was to breed a generation that could not abide waste. Newspapers, jars and string were diligently saved and reused. Glass bottles were returned to their makers. Most importantly, though, food was never, ever thrown away. Leftovers were recycled into new meals, day after day. Fast forward to today and things have changed. There are reports of rich countries throwing out 25-30% of what is bought. Add in what never even makes it to the cupboard or the refrigerator, and the scale of the problem is considerably larger. Retna No seconds for me Reliable data, though, are scarce. Existing reports usually collate small-scale studies of households’ leftovers and rubbish bins and then extrapolate the results across a country. So Kevin Hall and his colleagues at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, in Bethesda, Maryland, decided to look at the problem in a new way. As they report in the Public Library of Science, they calculated the calorific consumption of America’s population based on data in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey carried out by the country’s Centres for Disease Control and […]
BEIJING — A clutch of major emerging economies including China and India have forged a united front to put pressure on developed countries at next month’s climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. Over two days of quietly arranged talks in Beijing, the countries said they had reached agreement on major issues, including the need for the West to provide finance and technology to help developing nations combat global warming. The meeting was attended by senior officials from China, India, Brazil and South Africa as well as Sudan, the current chairman of the Group of 77 developing countries. ‘The purpose of the meeting was to prepare for and contribute to a positive, ambitious and equitable outcome in Copenhagen,’ according to a statement released after the talks, which took place on Friday evening and Saturday. ‘We believe that this work represents a good starting point and we will continue to work together over the next few days and weeks as our contribution towards a consensus in Copenhagen,’ the statement said. The meeting in Copenhagen was supposed to yield the outlines of a broader and tougher legally binding climate agreement to expand or replace the Kyoto Protocol, whose first […]
Last year, the United States overtook Germany to become the largest producer of wind energy in the world. This capped a five year expansion of U.S. wind power during which capacity increased by about a third every year. Robert Whittlesey and John Dabiri of the California Institute of Technology have developed a potentially more efficient wind farm design that maximizes the efficiency of land usage. They based their approach on the way that fish school, which they will present later this month at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society’s (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics will take place from November 22-24 at the Minneapolis Convention Center. ‘When fish swim, they shed tiny vortices in their wake,’ says Dabiri. ‘By schooling together, they can potentially help each other swim by transferring energy between one another through these vortices.’ Applying these same principles, Whittlesey and Dabiri have designed a wind farm of closely-spaced vertical-axis turbines (a design different from the more familiar propeller-type horizontal axis wind turbines). Their farm is arranged with the turbines closely spaced, so that as each is turned by the wind, it both extracts energy for itself and also helps to direct the […]
When you eat may be just as vital to your health as what you eat, found researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Their experiments in mice revealed that the daily waxing and waning of thousands of genes in the liver-the body’s metabolic clearinghouse-is mostly controlled by food intake and not by the body’s circadian clock as conventional wisdom had it. ‘If feeding time determines the activity of a large number of genes completely independent of the circadian clock, when you eat and fast each day will have a huge impact on your metabolism, says the study’s leader Satchidananda (Satchin) Panda, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Regulatory Biology Laboratory. The Salk researchers’ findings, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could explain why shift workers are unusually prone to metabolic syndrome, diabetes, high cholesterol levels and obesity. ‘We believe that it is not shift work per se that wreaks havoc with the body’s metabolism but changing shifts and weekends, when workers switch back to a regular day-night cycle, says Panda. In mammals, the circadian timing system is composed of a central circadian clock in […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
