Saline water occupies 71% of the Earth area. It is thought that even a quarter of the whole pedosphere is affected by salts (Glenn and O’Leary, 1985), amounting to 950 x 106 ha (Flowers and Yeo, 1995…

      Ashwani Kumar Energy Plantation Demonstration project and Biotechnology Center Bio-Technology Lab Department of Botany University of Rajasthan, Jaipur - 302 004 E mail:…

         Ashwani Kumar  Energy Plantation Demonstration project and Biotechnology Center. Bio-Technology Lab Department of Botany University of Rajasthan,…

Stanford scientists say they will reinvent digital photography with the introduction of an 'open-source' digital camera. If the technology catches on, camera performance will be no longer be limited…

This is so cool! I can't believe I haven't been hearing taxonomists buzz about this. 3M Novec is a new engineered material that is non-flammable (unlike ethanol) non-toxic (unlike formalin, though…

Tangential Science: it's not necessarily science, but it's still funny. 1. Science of Karma  Can there be science to 'Karma'?   Likely not, since Karma is, by definition, an Eastern…

Idaho National Laboratory engineer Phillip West holds a curious metallic device about as wide as a steering wheel. It looks a bit like a flat, stoic face, with two large circular holes for eyes,…

Do you ever wonder how many harmful mutations you carry in your genome? Even if you've never worried about how much of a mutant you are, geneticists have spent a lot of time thinking about this issue…

Should early 20th century researcher Paul Kammerer be credited as the founder of epigenetics?   It would certainly be a dramatic change from current perceptions of his work. Kammerer, a leading…

I have just read a letter in Chemistry World (September 2009, p40) by A J Dijkstra, who has just translated the first ever book on lipid chemistry from French into English. This book is Recherches…

A TubeSat picosatellite lifts 200 grams of payload. That's about 7 ounces. Looked at one way, that's less than half a can of soda. But it's enough to lift an entire Nintendo DS game handheld into…

The Physics in Collisions conference in Kobe is over, and I am packing up. Tomorrow morning I will leave from KIX to FRA, and later FRA to VCE, hopefully making it home for dinner. I learned a few…

A new image of nearby galaxy NGC 4945 shows that it looks a lot like our own Milky Way. NGC 4945 seems to be a spiral galaxy with swirling, luminous arms and a bar-shaped central region, though NGC…

Aloe plant has over 112 species. Generally Aloe vera is projected as health tonic. However in some literature 4 species are mentioned out of which Aloe vera is declared toxic to eat or drink. All…

One component of interstellar clouds emitting unusual infrared light known as the Unidentified Infrared Bands (UIRs) is a gaseous version of naphthalene, the chief component of mothballs back on…

The Eastern Seaboard had higher than normal sea levels in June and July and a new NOAA technical report blames persistent winds and a weakened current in the Mid-Atlantic .  After observing…

There were a number of reasons carbon dioxide got singled out as a primary contributor to global warming and a key one was that it was the easiest problem to fix in Europe - more nuclear power and…

 Tulsi ( Ocimum sanctum ) has potential as anticancer plant. The term ethnobotany was first used by Harshberger in 1885 and its scope was much elaborated later by Ford in 1978 and Faulks in…

More reality programs, less hard science coverage, and when they do cover hard science it's watered down.  This is all true as the production values of the programs have increased while the…

A giant galaxy, so distant that it is seen as it was 12.8 billion years ago, is as large as the Milky Way and contains a supermassive black hole with at least a billion times as much matter as our…