NEW DELHI — Days after the Obama administration unveiled a push to combat climate change, Indian officials said it was unlikely to prompt them to agree to binding emission cuts, a position among emerging economies that many say derails effective action. ‘If the question is whether India will take on binding emission reduction commitments, the answer is no. It is morally wrong for us to agree to reduce when 40 percent of Indians do not have access to electricity,’ said a member of the Indian delegation to the recently concluded U.N. conference in Bonn, Germany, which is a prelude to a Copenhagen summit in December on climate change. ‘Of course, everybody wants to go solar, but costs are very, very high.’ India’s position goes to the heart of the vexing international debate over how quickly nations should try to phase out carbon-spewing fuels such as coal and switch to renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. In India, the debate has been cast as a choice between pursuing urgently needed economic growth to reduce poverty and addressing climate change. More than 60 percent of India’s power is generated from coal. As India rapidly climbs the list […]
HONG KONG — Researchers in China say they have managed to generate new eggs using stem cells from the ovaries of young and adult female mice, taking a step towards addressing problems of female infertility. It is presently accepted in scientific circles that the production of eggs, known as oocytes, stops before birth for most species of mammals, including humans. In an article published in the journal Nature Cell Biology, scientists in China said they found a way to generate new eggs using stem cells harvested from the ovaries of juvenile and adult female mice. ‘The finding may have important implications in regenerative and reproductive medicine,’ they wrote. Two other scientists, unrelated to the study, said the results were interesting but needed independent confirmation. Led by Ji Wu from the School of Life Science and Biotechnology at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the researchers said they isolated female germline stem cells (FGSC) from the ovaries of five-day-old and adult mice. The cells were cultured for more than six months and then transplanted into the ovaries of infertile female mice, they said, adding that eighty percent of these mice went on to produce offspring after natural […]
Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink¦,’ said Coleridge in his poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Though the lines were not written in the context of lack of drinking water in general, but the sense conveyed would become a reality if the depletion of fresh water supplies continues at the current pace. Today, over 1.1 billion of the world’s total population use potentially harmful sources of water every year to meet some of their very basic needs, including quenching thirst. In clearer statistical terms, almost two in every 10 persons on this earth have no source of safe drinking water. This indirectly leads to a humanitarian crisis which causes death of nearly 3,900 children everyday across the world, according to the United Nations. In 2000, over 2.2 million human lives were lost due to waterborne diseases (related to the consumption of contaminated water) or drought. These are just some of the startling figures which highlight the existing ‘water crisis’. However, this is the crisis which ‘exists’, in the present. What’s going to come in the future is much more scary and grave. Challenge of the century The Director General of the UN’s […]
Roughly 20 percent of the electricity consumed worldwide is used to light homes, businesses, and other private and public spaces. Though this consumption represents a large drain on resources, it also presents a tremendous opportunity for savings. Improving the efficiency of commercially available light bulbs — even a little — could translate into dramatically lower energy usage if implemented widely. In the latest issue of Journal of Applied Physics, published by the American Institute of Physics (AIP), a group of scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences is reporting an important step towards that goal with their development of a new type of light emitting diode (LED) made from inexpensive, plastic like organic materials. Designed with a simplified ‘tandem’ structure, it can produce twice as much light as a normal LED — including the white light desired for home and office lighting. ‘This work is important because it is the realization of rather high efficiency white emission by a tandem structure,’ says Dongge Ma , who led the research with his colleagues at the Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Found in everything from brake lights to computer displays, LEDs are more […]
About a year ago, a book came out in England that made a fascinating prediction: at some point in the future, the author wrote, six top officials in the Bush Administration would get a tap on the shoulder announcing that they were being arrested on international charges of torture. If the prediction seemed improbable, the background of the book’s author was even more so. Philippe Sands is neither a journalist nor an American but a law professor and a certified Queen’s Counsel (the kind of barrister who on occasion wears a powdered horsehair wig) who works at the same law practice as Cherie Blair. Sands’s book, ‘Torture Team, offers a scathing critique of officials in the Bush Administration, accusing them of complicity in acts of torture. When the book appeared, some scoffed. Douglas Feith, a former Pentagon official, dismissed Sands as ‘a British lawyer who ‘wrote an extremely dishonest book. Last week, Sands’s accusations suddenly did not seem so outlandish. A Spanish court took the first steps toward starting a criminal investigation of the same six former Bush Administration officials he had named, weighing charges that they had enabled and abetted torture by justifying the abuse of terrorism […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
