Making way

The way the earth's plantlife is today has been the result of a unique process of "peaceful transition"

A world of robots

An Indian schoolstudent recently won the silver at a robotics competition, and brought home the fact that robots are here to stay, for better or …

Charge of the right brigade

Lithium batteries, with numerous advantages over their ancestors, are scientists' new obsession as the ecofriendly cells

Catch a falling star

What on Earth are comets? And why do they behave whimsically like they do?

Anatomy of the plague

The Black Death is an established phenomenon the world over, so there is no point pillorying India alone

200 years of groping in the dark

...and latest findings have 2 groups of mutually hostile astronomers still going cockeyed trying to gauge the age of the universe

Counting out pestilence

The patterns that diseases furrow among large sections of a population provide clues to check epidemics

Why one cell becomes a nose and another, an eye

All living things begin life as a single cell, and one of the most intriguing puzzles for biologists is to understand how a particular cell knows …

Exotic denizens of the particle zoo

From ancient Greece to the world of today, humans have always believed that the amazing diversity of objects in the universe can be interpreted …

Playing dice with development

Like all such meetings before, the UN World Summit in Copenhagen had to address the needs of the commoner, the bedrock of all nations

Should life forms be patented globally?

Patents are monopoly rights granted to the inventors to protect their economic interests. But this becomes complicated when the patent is …

Catching the wind

Modern designers of interior climate control can learn a thing or two from traditional windtowers and windtunnels

A star spender with clipped wings

The ambitious Indian space programme, despite occasional setbacks, has had its share of success. A backgrounder to the programme which is very …

Turning on the heat

The international community is being exhorted to enforce a greenhouse regime

Green clean

Enzymes are the new, hip, ecof riendly detergent components

Dying repositories of the world's biodiversity

Rich in flora and fauna, rain forests are nevertheless ecologically fragile. Their loss due to human depredation could result in environmental …

World's biodiversity needs to be preserved

Biodiversity - the billions of life forms that exist on earth - ranges in size from microscopic be viruses to blue whales that are more than 30 …

Global resource use must be careful and fair

Environmental stress has resulted mainly from unsustainable consumption levels in poor nations because of bad land-use and degraded village …

The road from Stockholm to Rio

It was the Stockholm conference, held exactly 20 years ago, which put environmental issues on the global agenda for the first time. But the …

Stuffed to death

How excess nutrients can kill a lake

Promoting integrated village planning

Self-sustaining rural communities could be India's answer to her disrupted ecosystem.

Delayed hazards of earth's fiery outbursts

Volcanic explosions don't only throw up a lot of dust and kill thousands of people. Even two years after a flare-up, weather patterns in distant …

Explaining the chemistry of an oil spill

Oil tanker spills compound the danger to the marine food chain by crude released into the sea in normal operations and seepage from the earth. …

Trapping the sun's energy

All our energy needs could be met if even a fraction of the solar energy received on the earth could be converted into electricity, and the means …

What is Sustainable Development?

Sustainable development, the buzzword in environmental circles, is largely misunderstood. It can only come about in a society which can …