Tag: Environment

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,...

El Nino, Nature’s chaotic climate agent, has formed in a warmed-up Pacific Ocean and is expected to grow to historic strength, meteorologists announced on Thursday (June 11, 2026). Experts said the El Nino, a natural warming cycle, should further heat a globe already warming from fossil fuel pollution and will likely turbocharge extreme weather across...

One of the first things visitors arriving in Mexico City for the FIFA football World Cup are likely to see is the wide grin of an axolotl — with the salamander ​unique to this part of the world splashed in bright purple on murals and subway cars or depicted in sculptures dribbling a soccer ball....

With more than 7,500 km of coastline and millions of people living in low-lying coastal areas, India faces a dilemma that it has often been told is really a trap: use engineering solutions to hold the line, so to speak, or to beat a retreat inland. While many adaptation experts and institutions in high-income countries...

The story so far: A Mega Science Vision-2035 report on Climate Research is a roadmap prepared by the Indian climate research community with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, as the nodal institution, and submitted to the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) to the Government of India, was made public this week....