Feature
Cancer and stem cells
More evidence that tumours, like healthy organs, grow from stem cellsThe notion that tumours are chaotic masses of anarchic cells has been falling by the wayside recently. Many researchers now think, by contrast, that cancers actually resemble normal, well-regulated organs in several important ways. One of these is that they are believed to have a small population of stem cells which keep them going when other cells die or are killed off. The existence of such cancer stem cells is still a matter of debate. But this week the discussion may have taken an important turn. Brid Ryan, Sharon Pine and Curtis Harris, of America’s National Cancer Institute, reported that some lung-cancer cells do, indeed, seem to behave like stem cells during the process of cell division.
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Monday,18 January, 2010 | Hits: 219
The change in climate due to carbon dioxide emissions and deforestation is far worse than thought before, says Joydeep Gupta.
GLOBAL alarm over climate change and its effects has risen manifold after the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Since then, many of the 2,500-odd IPCC scientists have found climate change is progressing faster than the worst-case scenario they had predicted. Their studies will be considered for the next IPCC report, but since that will come out only in 2013, the University of New South Wales in Sydney has just put together the main findings in the last three years. Most are by previous IPCC lead authors "familiar with the rigour and completeness required for a scientific assessment of this nature", a university spokesperson said.
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Saturday,09 January, 2010 | Hits: 182
Climate Change Did we or did we not? As mankind debates global warming at summits, holds meetings under water, on mountain peaks, the heat is definitely on. Ocean surfaces are getting warmer, the world’s ice sheet has started to melt, and black carbon from Asia threatens to melt Himalayan glaciers. Here is our top ten climate altering events over the last one year.
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Monday,28 December, 2009 | Hits: 178
There has been much economic progress, but not in employees' attitude to their employers..
The date is December 2015 and the place is Bangalore.
Hundreds of business leaders, HR leaders, research scholars, heads of educational institutions, psychologists, trade union leaders, representatives from the investor fraternity and trade body representatives have gathered for the first ever international organisational climate change talks.
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Sunday,27 December, 2009 | Hits: 183
We are the worst polluters of our land, water and air. The pity is we don’t care.
When Queen Elizabeth II visited Delhi twelve years, she was so “disgusted” with “dirty Delhi” that she complained to the then Prime Minister, Mr Inder Kumar Gujral, at a state banquet that India’s capital was one of the dirtiest cities she had visited.
Asked to explain what she had meant by “dirty”, a senior official from the British High Commission responded by explaining that the Queen was referring to “people easing themselves in public.”
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Saturday,19 December, 2009 | Hits: 144
Need to change the mind-set of people, says Sheila at Green Energy Summit
Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit on Thursday said only renewable and green energy holds the promise of helping humankind tackle climate change and there are therefore numerous challenges that remain to be met in this regard.Addressing the Ninth Green Energy Summit organised by India Energy Forum, Ms. Dikshit emphasised the need for promoting green energy including renewable energy. She said it should not be forgotten that energy resources from fossils fuel were not going to last long and the energy requirements were galloping by the day.
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Thursday,29 October, 2009 | Hits: 86
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, that will recreate conditions that existed in the beginning of the universe, is ready.The 27 km tunnel in which the high energy particle accelerator is located is now finally shut, indicating that the world’s most expensive science experiment is set to restart.Atul Gurtu, a physicist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental research (TIFR), which has been involved with the LHC at various stages, has just returned from the LHC site.“The first low energy beam is likely to be injected into the particle accelerator in mid-November,” Gurtu said.
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Wednesday,28 October, 2009 | Hits: 155
The fifth edition of the Centre for Media Studies’ (CMS) Vatavaran Environment and Wildlife film festival kicked off in the Capital on Tuesday with a vast gamut of national and international cinema on nature and conservation.Out of the array of 106 films, 73 are from Delhi-based directors with themes ranging from man-animal conflict to the BRT corridor.With an eye on the crucial climate talks between nations a little over a month away at Copenhagen, Denmark, the festival’s theme this year is Climate Change and Sustainable Technologies.
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Tuesday,27 October, 2009 | Hits: 110
Signature campaign to create awareness of the lake’s degradation
At a time when Dal Lake – the flagship of Kashmir’s tourism and beauty – is dying a slow death due to ‘failure of the government’ to stop the continuous sewage inflow, the Little Wonders school, a centre for early childhood education, has started a signature campaign for saving the lake. The school had drafted a petition letter addressed to the Chief Minister and is gathering signatures of common people before forwarding it to the office concerned.
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Sunday,01 November, 2009 | Hits: 247
Calculating exactly how much carbon dioxide but this too remains an imprecise science.
Targets and trust. These are at the heart of a tougher new global climate pact possibly just weeks away.The bigger the pledged emissions cuts or reductions in growth in carbon dioxide pollution, the greater the need to prove nations meet those targets and curb the pace of climate change.
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Saturday,09 January, 2010 | Hits: 128
