The Punjab Energy Development Agency has released a draft green hydrogen policy aiming to achieve a green hydrogen and ammonia production capacity of 100 kilo tonnes per annum by 2030. The policy proposes extending incentives under the existing “Punjab Industrial and Business Development Policy 2022” to new green hydrogen and …
THE discovery of x-ray emission from the newest visitor to the realm of solar system on March 27: the Comet Hyakutake (pronounced yah-koo-tah- kay) by the German x-ray satellite called the Roentgen Satellite (ROSAT), has puzzled astrophysicists the world over. The comet was emitting x-rays in an unusual crescent pattern …
Pakistan's power sector is poised for a big boost with the recent announcement of a US $600 million financial package by the World Bank (WB) to produce electricity from untapped natural gas reserves in the south-west region of the country. Several US, European and Asian companies and banks will be …
THE World Commission on Environmental Development, 1987, gave way to the famous Brundtland Commission Report titled Our Common Future. This report, for the first time, made 'sustainability' a major international issue and gave it a much wider relevance in the process. Thus, sustainability came to be associated with equity, international …
ALTHOUGH forms of life found on oceanic islands have their mainland cousins, they develop distinct identities for themselves. The uniqueness of these living beings is attributed to the changes that they undergo in order to adapt to the island environment. Scientists believe that such differences could not be chance occurrences …
AS THE world's fossil fuel reserves decline, the search for a clean, inexpensive and sustainable source of energy hots up. At a site near Abingdon, a us $794 million experiment to develop a new and virtually non-polluting energy source has entered the final phase of its programme. The experiment, known …
Mad cows on net The newest site where the mad cow disease has struck is the Web. The research group CAB International hassetupahomepage at http://www.cabi.org/whatsnew/bse containing more t~an309sc.ientific references on bovIne spongIform encelopathy and Cruetjfeldt-Jacob disease. The British ministries of agriculture, fisheries and food badly hit by the recent fiasco, …
Human endeavours like the building of dams are now being held responsible for the planet spinning a wee bit faster. Benjamin Chao, a geophysicistat NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, US, says that the days are shortening by about O;2millionthsofa second per year. Chao's observations are based on …
A bacterial colony was recently discovered 4,500 ft below the earth's surface, surviving apparently on only rock and water. The cluster was found in an aquifer near the river Columbia (close to the Hanford nuclear facility), in the state of Washington, US, by microbiologist Todd Stevens and geochemist James McKinley, …
Private access Two Purdue University students discovered a major flaw in the highly-regarded Kerberos software, developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and International Business Machines, US. Steven Lodin and Bryn R Dole claim that a hacker can read confidential mail and masquerade as anauthorised user once he can penetrate …
The world will require 1,330 giga watts of new electric generating capacity in the next 15 years according to Hans Weinrich, head of the Sweden-based Asea Brown Boveri's (ABB) transmission and distribution unit. The new capacity would be distributed around the globe, with 15 per cent in the US, 20 …
COME May and it is din-creating time for frogs. The month heralds the breeding season which lasts till August. At times, noise levels call be so high that it makes one suspect if the frogs are taking part in a competition to test their ability to croak loud and long. …
A DELICATE plant, producing yellow flowers -Calceolaria andina is proving to be the nemesis for a notoriously high-resistant variety of tobacco whitefly, Bemisia tabaci. Two chemicals from the plant, which grows high on the Andean slopes, has been found to be fatal for the B- biotype species of the pest. …
THIS mouse, was born in the Jackson laboratory at Bar Harbor, Maine, us. Its birth marked the culmination of years of research by developmental biologist John Eppig and his research assistant Marilyn O'Brien. The actual process of raising the creature took three weeks, which is the normal period of gestation …
Two biochemical manufacturing farms, with obviously environmental protection as one of their fortes, have begun testing an alternative to incineration for noxious wastes like paint thinners and jet fuels. ENV America in California, and High Mesa Technologies Inc. of Santa Fe, New Mexico, are the pioneers in using the Free …
The Panay cloudrunner -a rodent- like nocturnal mammal -previously unknown to science, has been discovered in the island of Panay in the central Philippines. The arboreal rodent which has been assigned the scientific name of Crateromys heaneyi, was discovered by local residents. The animal sports a chubby, masked face; small …
MILLIONS of pounds will be spent in the UK over the next three years on a new generation of high-speed radio networks that will provide super- highway services directly in offices and homes. The systems mean that consumers and businesspeople can have access to the Internet and use high-speed digital …
IN 1987, a group of researchers had discovered the intriguing new phenomenon of high temperature superconductivity. The conventional superconductors had a critical temperature (temperature below which the material is superconducting) which was extremely low - typically, about -250'c. However, the new materials, which were mostly very complex crystals like yttriumbarium-copper-oxide …
Farmers in Burkina Faso's central plateau in Sahel, are turning to traditional practices such as building stone lines, pocket-like pits known as Zaiand permeable stone dams. These increase yields by as much as 80 percent in some of the farms by preventing draining of water, increasing its seepage into soil …
The Denakil desert of Eritrea in Africa has turned out to be another exploration site for human fossils. In December last year, a team of Eritrean and Italian scientists led by Ernesto Abbate from the University of Florence in Italy, recovered well- preserved parts of a two-million- year-old human fossil …
IT IS the phosphorus element that holds the key to the oxygen feedback mechanism, according to Philippe Van Cappellen of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and Eltery Ingall of the University of Texas at Austin, us. Atmospheric oxygen is mostly produced by the photosynthetic algae floating on the …
