SCIENCE & DEVELOPMENT

The Zika Crisis Needs a Global Response

GLOBAL concerns about a new viral pandemic have started making headlines barely weeks after resolution of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. The virus responsible for panic buttons being pressed, with the WHO declaring a ‘public health emergency of international concern’, is the Zika virus. Threats to health at a global scale in the form of epidemics caused by viruses are now too frequent to view these threats as one-off events.

CRISPR: Good Science or Evil Science?

A THREE-YEAR old technology of gene editing called CRISPR is now the focus of two major disputes. The disputes are: who (or which team) will get the Nobel Prize for this discovery, and the other, the patent rights over the technology coming out of this discovery. One is the holy grail of science; not the discovery itself, but the public accolade that goes with it.

Urban Air Pollution: Will Delhi Even Out the Odds?

THE short and temporary experiment in Delhi to combat severe air pollution by rationing road-use by personal four-wheeled vehicles on alternate days, corresponding to odd or even numbered dates and license plates, is to end this weekend. The media especially newspapers, who for once have taken good advantage of their greater ability than TV for in-depth coverage, have been full of analysis of whether the odd-even formula has worked or not.

The Trojan Horse of Free Basics

FACEBOOK is running a high profile, misleading campaign, using full page advertisements, blocks of TV time, hoardings, and Facebook itself. This campaign, estimated to cost more than Rs 400 crore, is promoting Facebook's private, proprietary platform called “Free Basics” and calling its opponents as anti-poor. In India, Facebook has tied up with Reliance Telecommunications for offering this platform.

If Cities Have to Breathe, Diesel Cars Need to Go

 Bodies such as Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), Delhi Science Forum and others have been flagging the issue of air pollution from diesel vehicles for years. They have been pointing out that small particulate matter, particularly below 2.5 micron size (PM 2.5) and Nitrous Oxides (NOx) omissions are much higher for diesel vehicles and these are dangerous to health. Increasingly, health and air quality experts around the world have been concerned with the rise of pollutant levels in towns and cities, particularly from diesel vehicles.

Paris Climate Agreement: US has its Way

After all, the prospect of failure at Paris was too scary and all national governments were under pressure, both international and domestic, to deliver.The Paris Agreement certainly represents a breakthrough in the prevailing stalemate in the sense that it binds more than 195 nations to some commonly agreed and binding framework for a joint struggle against climate change with far-reaching measures to combat the crisis. It is the broadest, officially-backed recognition of the reality of human-induced climate change, and the need for a low-carbon pathway to tackle it.

Paris Climate Summit: Contradictions And Moving Goalposts

SO COP 21 (Conference of Parties) is finally here and fingers are crossed all over the world that the summit will deliver a definitive outcome. Problem is that nobody is particularly optimistic about how effective that outcome will be in terms of dealing with the clear, present and immediate danger posed by climate change. At the same time, almost everybody is sure that COP21 will end with some concrete agreement, probably named after Paris much like the Kyoto Protocol that it will replace, that will be greeted with applause and hailed as a success.

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