Category: Environment

More than a thousand varieties of mangoes exist in India, the popular ones being Banganapalli, Dassheri, Alphonso, Badaami, Imaam Pasandh, and Mulgoa. There is even a “Lalbagh” variety in Bengaluru. Many of us associate the fruit with a summer childhood memory, of eating it with our bare hands, the mango juice dripping on our clothes....

In the mines of Mongbwalu, the epicentre of an Ebola outbreak in the northeastern Democratic Republic Congo, gold prospectors have no choice but to overcome their fear of the virus and carry on their backbreaking work. “Ebola is real and it scares us. But if I stay at home, what are my children going to...

Birds fly in flocks, fish swim in schools. What bonds them together, without dispersal or collision? Mathematicians from New York University (NYU) explained the method to the madness: the animals move in tandem, like an orchestra with a maestro leading them. A bird’s flapping wings, for instance, produces “vortex wakes” (or travelling waves) with each...

A United Nations (UN) body that regulates deep international waters is preparing to elect its next leader, a crucial position as it faces pressure to either ban, approve or place a moratorium on seabed mining. The upcoming election comes as the Jamaica-based International Seabed Authority (ISA) ended a two-week session on July 26 without reaching...

While the world’s coffee drinkers favour Arabica or Robusta, a newly identified hybrid called Coffea x libex (the X denotes its hybrid status) — or just Libex — could be their brew of choice in future. The world drinks roughly 17,000 tonnes of Arabica and 10,000 tonnes of Robusta beans (pre-roasting) every day. Together, they...

In response to a new heatwave alert across Europe, France has partially banned the consumption of alcohol. Why? The restriction is a public health measure as part of reducing heat-related illnesses. Alcohol affects the body in many ways that become more dangerous if the person is also exposed to extreme heat. It causes the body...

India’s agriculture faces a serious paradox: a large amount of biomass that could improve soil health is instead being burned. This threatens soil health and food security. Punjab and Haryana burn more than 20 million tonnes of paddy straw in their open fields every year. This is due to the short post-harvest periods and a...

While surface ozone — a pollutant harmful to the heart and lungs — already exceeds safe limits across much of India in the hot pre-monsoon months, a new study finds that heatwaves push it to still higher levels, thus adding several hundred deaths to a far larger toll that the study links to ozone across...

Bangladesh recently approved the construction of the Padma barrage. The barrage is intended to control the Padma river, which is the name of the Ganga in Bangladesh, and abate the country’s seasonal water scarcity. The 2.1-km-long structure will store 2,900 million cu. m of water to serve 6.5 crore people across southwestern and northern Bangladesh....

A new study published in Science has reported the first global map of the earth’s vast underground network of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi. These fungi have sustained plant life for millions of years but their scale and distribution has been largely invisible until now. Using machine learning and data from more than 16,000 soil cores,...