Malawi’s Legal Battle over Uranium Mining Subsiding By Gregory Gondwe MZUZU, DEC 20 – Raging legal battle over uranium mining in Malawi is subsiding after civil society organisations that took the matter to court announced that they have settled the matter outside court amid bribery accusations. Six Non-Governmental Organisations that included the Citizens for […]
Humans are not the only sapiens
We were taught at school and college that of all animals, it is us humans who are the thinking ones, the sapient or wise ones. Now we realize how anthropocentric this claim has been. The title we have given ourselves, homo sapiens, is a trifle arrogant particularly since the antonym of ‘sapient’ is ‘stupid’. Memory […]
Does Prayer Heal ?
The other day, I was at a function organized by the Christian Medical Association of India – an umbrella of close to 300 plus non-profit Christian Hospitals, many of them close to a century old and some older. They were observing World AIDS Day and the topic of discussion was the unique contribution that […]
Seymour Benzer, father of behavioral genetics, died on Nov 30, 2007.
Seymour Benzer, a founder of the field of modern genetics, died from a stroke on Friday, November 30, at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena. He was 86. An emeritus professor at the California Institute of Technology, Benzer’s lasting impact on modern-day genetics can be seen in continuing work whose foundations he helped lay. Studies in gene […]
It’s Ten Years Since Ecological Economics First Saw The Limelight – What’s Happened Since?
It’s been ten years since the US ecologic economics expert Robert Constanza shocked the world by slapping a monetary value on the earth’s natural resources. Now, a decade later, has the science come of age? When Constanza estimated air, minerals, water and soil at a combined value of USD33 trillion in 1997, he triggered a […]
Massive decoding effort reveals fruit fly DNA
An enormous effort to decode the DNA of one of the most important laboratory animals, the fruit fly, ended in success this week as a collaboration of researchers from 16 nations announced the sequencing of 10 fly species’ genomes. The research allows the extraordinary side-by-side comparison of the DNA of 12 species of […]