Likewise, many businesses around the world are pondering if consumers could actually chomp on their water bottles, plates and spoons once they have consumed the food packed in them.

There were reports in March of nano-plastic particles present in water bottles from well-known brands posing serious threats to consumer health. This could well be the solution to such threats, the report said.

Ooho water pouches from Skipping Rocks Lab, a UK-based sustainable packaging startup, are being made from seaweed for an esoteric post-beverage snack.

Though eating the water pouches might not be a reality at this point, they have received the thumbs up from French President Emmanuel Macron in December, as they offer a glimpse of a plastic-free future, the report said.

These containers could also help save the oceans. The pouches encase a serving of water in a thin membrane made from brown algae. They were developed in London by Pierre-Yves Paslier and Rodrigo García Gonzalez, who claim seaweed is safe to eat and regrows quickly, too.

Ooho’s edible capsule and (another UK-made product) Herald’s edible straw have both been pitched as potential alternatives to plastic, said Philip Chadwick, editor of Packaging News. “The ongoing plastics debate could mean that more edible packs will be developed.”

Besides the UK firm, Indonesia’s Evoware launched seaweed packaging in September that can wrap a burger or noodles. In New York, Loliware has come up with a cup you can eat, made from agar seaweed, and is working on an edible seaweed straw.

Herald’s edible straw is made in Barking. It is a sweet proposition, made from sugar, corn starch and jelly, and lasts 40 minutes inside a mojito before it starts to fall apart.

Peesapaty’s edible spoons can be eaten up after polishing off a bowl of daal (pulses). In Poland, there are Biotrem’s wheatbran plates you can scoff.

However, Chadwick is not sure whether consumers would be comfortable eating the packaging? “Will it taste good? Would anyone want to eat packaging that has been handled by other shoppers,”, the Guardian report wondered.

IANS

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Bhatnagar’s work has led to the creation of the new field of environmental cardiology.

A Lucknow University graduate with a bio-chemistry doctorate from the Central Drug Research Institute (CDRI), also in Lucknow, he is a professor and university scholar with Louisville’s Institute of Molecular Cardiology. He is also a fellow with the American Heart Association.

The Green Heart project involves the University of Louisville, the Nature Conservancy, the Institute for Healthy Air, Land and Soil and other partners that will transform four South Louisville neighbourhoods, home to about 22,000 residents, with 8,000 trees and other plantings.

Bhatnagar said the trees will not be samplings but mature foliage which will make a difference right away. Trees, shrubs and other plants will be placed where they can best soak up lung-damaging air pollution within the study area.

Researchers will track the health of about 700 residents to ascertain cardiovascular response to the plantation.

He said green spaces breathe in their own way, taking up the heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide while creating life-sustaining oxygen.

While trees produce volatile organic compounds—a source of ozone pollution—they also absorb ozone and other pollutants and trap especially dangerous tiny particles.

But “nobody has evaluated the specific health effects of planting green spaces”.

He said the effect of plantation on human health where people’s health is monitored before, during and after a major tree plantation drive has not been studied so far.

The health of people who live near the newly planted greenery will be compared to those who live elsewhere in the study area.

“We are hopeful to see changes in a few years,” he said. “It’s like a drug trial, with nature as the drug.”

Bhatnagar said he and his team wanted to test whether giving someone a statin for cardiovascular management is better or worse than giving one green surroundings.

In addition to studying cardiovascular health, researchers also plan to see if there are any changes in crime rates, stress, economics and other social-psycho outcomes.

Some studies suggest trees can help in those areas, too.

He said the Louisville research can be a potential game-changer in fighting heart disease.

“Though heart disease rates have been coming down, the rate has slowed and flattened out in the recent past. That’s why we thought we need to try something different,” he explained.

So far research has identified poor diet and lack of exercise with heart risk. We haven’t studied the impact of the environment in preventing or managing the cardiovascular situation in the urban population. About 70 percent of heart disease is preventable but it still accounts for the largest cause of deaths, Bhatnagar added.

IANS

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“We could enable the world’s largest network of mosquito surveillance—just purely using tools that almost everyone around the world now is carrying in their pocket,” said lead researcher Manu Prakash, senior author of a paper in the journal eLife that demonstrates the feasibility of this approach.

Mosquito species can be differentiated by the frequency of their wingbeats, which is what produces their characteristic whine.

The Prakash Lab at Stanford wants citizen scientists to contribute to Abuzz, a mosquito monitoring platform the lab developed to produce the map of mosquito distribution.

Contributing to this research is as simple as holding a cellphone microphone near a mosquito, recording its hum as it flies and uploading the recording to the Abuzz website.

The researchers take the raw signal, clean up that audio to reduce background noise and run it through an algorithm that matches that particular buzz with the species that is most likely to have produced it.

Once the match is found, the researchers would send the person who submitted the recording information about the mosquito they found and mark every recording on a map on the website, showing exactly where and when that mosquito species was sighted.

“If you see a mosquito and you swat it, you’ve saved yourself an itch for one day. But if you see a mosquito and you record it and you send the data to the Abuzz project, then you’ve potentially contributed to an effort that can reduce the burden of mosquito-borne disease for many generations in the future, hopefully,” said Haripriya Mukundarajan, a graduate student in the Prakash Lab.

The researchers designed the platform so that it can work off recordings from almost any model of cellphone.

The Abuzz algorithm works using as little as one fifth of a second of sound—although recordings that are a second or longer are the most desirable, the researchers said.

IANS

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Kamraj, also the head of National Waterways Development Technology, said the National Waterways Project envisages a way in which the two rivers can be linked through a waterway built on an even plane enabling two-way flow between the rivers.

Also known as Smart Waterways, the project is evolved by Kamraj.

One of the advantages of the technology, Kamaraj says, is that unlike the traditional interlinking of rivers which involves pumping of water using a lot of electricity, this technology uses only the “excess flood water that goes to seas un-utilised” without any pumping.

“The new and unique proposal… only harnesses the excess flood water that goes to sea unutilised, that too just 25 per cent of flood water and 75 per cent of water still goes to sea.”

”Nothing has happened for the last 35 years with the interlinking project when Indira Gandhi government formed the National Water Development agency in 1982,” Kamraj said in a press conference on Saturday.

“The actual plan goes further back to the time of Nehru. It was approximated at that time that the interlinking of Ganga and Kaveri rivers alone would require the power equivalent to that being produced in the entire country.”

He said that the project was technically sound but was cold-freezed because of prohibitive costs.

But Kamaraj is hopeful of seeing the networking of rivers materialise now that Union Minister of Shipping and Water Resources Nitin Gadkari has shown interest in “his technology” along with several southern states.

“I met Mr Gadkari last in March. He was happy with our proposal. Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Telangana also showed satisfaction with the idea,” Kamraj said.

The alternative idea of linking of rivers through waterways was first proposed during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, which had formed a task force for the interlinking of rivers and “had found lot of problems” in it.

“Twenty-one proposals were received from all over the country including ours… and reviewed by IIT professors. After reviewing all the proposals, the National Waterways Project (NWP) was declared the best,” he said.

Kamraj says that linking through waterways will grant several benefits over the traditional interlinking of rivers. For instance, it will enable the government to irrigate almost double the size of fields as compared to traditional interlinking.

Bi-directional flow of water, zero pumping, enabling of 15,000 km of navigation, reduction of land acquisition from eight per cent to two per cent, and 40 per cent flood control against four per cent possible under the traditional method are a few other advantages with the technology, said Kamraj.

The current government aims to link 60 rivers across the country at a cost of $80 billion. The mammoth project includes Ken-Betwa link between the states of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.

But Kamraj says that the project will remain stuck in controversies just like sharing of water of river Kaveri between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

”Even if they are completed, this will be another Kaveri issue bringing the fight between UP (Uttar Pradesh) and MP (Madhya Pradesh),” he said.

Kamraj said the Netherlands and Canada have also been impressed by his project and have shown interest in adopting the technology for their countries.

IANS

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It converts heat into electricity up to three times more efficiently than silicon—a semi-conductor material widely used in the electronics industry.

“The ability of our diode to convert heat into electricity is very large compared to other bulk materials currently used in electronics,” said physicist Yi Gu from Washington State University.

“In the future, one layer could be attached to something hot like a car exhaust or a computer motor and another to a surface at room temperature,” he added.

“The diode would then use the heat differential between the two surfaces to create an electric current that could be stored in a battery and used when needed.”

In the world of electronics, Schottky diodes are used to guide electricity in a specific direction.

They are made by attaching a conductor metal like aluminium to a semi-conductor material like silicon.

”When you attach a metal to a semi-conductor material like silicon to form a Schottky diode, there are always some defects that form at the interface,” said Matthew McCluskey, the study’s co-author.

“These imperfections trap electrons, impeding the flow of electricity. Gu’s diode is unique in that as its surface does not appear to have any of these defects,” McCluskey added.

This lowers resistance to the flow of electricity, making the device much more energy efficient.

IANS

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These newly discovered volcanoes range in height from 100 to 3,850 m, with the highest almost as tall as Switzerland’s 3,970-m Eiger mountain.

These active peaks are concentrated in a region known as the west Antarctic rift system—which stretches 3,500 km from Antarctica’s Ross ice-shelf to the Antarctic peninsula.

According to geologists, this huge region is likely to dwarf east Africa’s volcanic ridge—currently rated as the densest concentration of volcanoes in the world.

However, the activity of this range could have worrying consequences, glacier expert Robert Bingham was quoted as saying to the Guardian.

“If one of these volcanoes were to erupt it could further destabilise west Antarctica’s ice sheets,” Bingham warned.

“Anything that causes the melting of ice, which an eruption certainly would, is likely to speed up the flow of ice into the sea,” he said.

“The big question is: how active are these volcanoes? That is something we need to determine as quickly as possible,” he added.

The Edinburgh volcano survey, reported in the Geological Society’s special publications series, involved studying the underside of the west Antarctica ice sheet for hidden peaks of basalt rock similar to those produced by the region’s other volcanoes.

Presently, volcanism is seen in regions, including Iceland and Alaska, that have recently lost their glacier covering. The same could happen in west Antarctica, where significant warming in the region caused by climate change has begun to affect its ice sheets.

If they are reduced significantly, this could release pressure on the volcanoes that lie below and lead to eruptions that could further destabilise the ice sheets and enhance sea level rises that are already affecting our oceans, Bingham noted.

IANS

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This helps the fish and their wild relatives, crucian carp survive for days, even months, in oxygen-free water at the bottom of ice-covered ponds.

“During their time in oxygen-free water in ice-covered ponds, which can last for several months in their northern European habitat, blood alcohol concentrations in crucian carp can reach more than 50 mg per 100 millilitres, which is above the drink drive limit in these countries,” said Dr Michael Berenbrink from University of Liverpool in the research published in the journal Scientific Reports.

“However, this is still a much better situation than filling up with lactic acid, which is the metabolic end product for other vertebrates, including humans, when devoid of oxygen,” Berenbrink added.

The muscles of goldfish and crucian carp contain two sets of the proteins normally used to channel carbohydrates towards their breakdown within a cell’s mitochondria.

The second set is activated by the absence of oxygen and shows a mutation that allows channelling of metabolic substrates to ethanol formation outside the mitochondria.

“This research emphasises the role of whole genome duplications in the evolution of biological novelty and the adaptation of species to previously inhospitable environments,” added lead author Dr Cathrine Elisabeth Fagernes from the University of Oslo.

“The ethanol production allows the crucian carp to be the only fish species surviving and exploiting these harsh environments, thereby avoiding competition and escaping predation by other fish species with which they normally interact in better oxygenated waters,” Elisabeth noted.

IANS

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The handfish, which uses fins resembling hands to “walk” along the seabed, was the first marine species in the world to be listed as critically endangered.

Csiro researcher Tim Lynch said discarded bottles were an ideal breeding location for the fish after their traditional breeding grounds were destroyed by man-made structures and pest species like seastars.

“The seastars can’t eat the bottles at least, and we often find spotted handfish hiding behind discarded bottles,” Lynch said.

Lynch said artificial habitats such as the bottles would be a large part of conservation efforts in the future.

The Csiro and Zoo Aquarium Association recently committed $63,000 to a project Lynch is involved in, which places plastic sticks in the Derwent river for the handfish to lay their eggs on.

Female handfish typically lay 200 eggs after breeding with a male which they then care for until they hatch.

Plans for a captivity breeding programme have been approved which would see a small population captured and propagated at aquariums in Melbourne and Hobart.

“Let people have a look at these things—hardly anyone has seen them,” Lynch said.

“They shouldn’t be a rare fish, they used to be very common. There should be a spotted handfish every five metres of so in good habitat.”

IANS

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The team which includes Carnegie Institution’s Ken Caldeira, Long Cao and Lei Duan of Zhejiang University, and Govindasamy Bala of the Indian Institute of Science used models to simulate what would happen if sunlight is scattered by particles at the same time as the cirrus clouds were thinned.

They wanted to understand how effective this combined set of tools would be at reversing climate change, both globally and regionally.

“As far as I know, this is the first study to try to model using two different geoengineering approaches simultaneously to try to improve the overall fit of the technology,” Caldeira explained.

Solar geoengineering (such as injection of sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere) has been proposed as a means to counteract this climate change by deliberately deflecting more sunlight from the earth’s climate system.

However, climate-modeling studies have shown that while this scattering of sunlight should reduce the warming caused by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it would tend to reduce rainfall and other types of precipitation.

It has also been suggested that the earth could be cooled by thinning cirrus clouds. This would also reduce warming, but would not correct the increase in precipitation caused by global warming.

One method reduces rain too much. Another method reduces rain too little.

This is where the theoretical cocktail shaker gets deployed.

“We simulate climate effect of cocktail geoengineering that combines stratospheric sulfate aerosol increase and cirrus cloud thinning. Cocktail geoengineering can offset carbon dioxide-induced changes in global mean temperature and precipitation simultaneously,” the experts say in the study published in the Geophysical Research Letters.

The good news is the simulations showed that if both methods are deployed in concert, it would decrease warming to pre-industrial levels, as desired, and on a global level rainfall would also stay at pre-industrial levels.

However, while global average climate was largely restored, substantial differences remained locally, with some areas getting much wetter and other areas getting much drier.

“The same amount of rain fell around the globe in our models, but it fell in different places, which could create a big mismatch between what our economic infrastructure expects and what it will get,” Caldeira added.

“More complicated geoengineering solutions would likely do a bit better, but the best solution is simply to stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.”

IANS

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The scheme aims to eventually allow users to rent and return bicycles at 25 automated stations distributed across the city.

For now, a single station is operating in central Beirut, with limited cyclist lanes available to those looking to beat the traffic.

Prime Minister Saad Hariri officially inaugurated the scheme, participating in a bike ride and pledging to organise car-free days to prioritise cycling in the city.

Around half a million cars clog Beirut’s streets on a daily basis, according to experts, causing enormous traffic jams and contributing to air pollution.

But only a handful of cyclists brave the roads, where drivers regularly ignore traffic signals and lanes are virtually an unknown concept.

The bike programme has already started in the northern city of Byblos, and there are plans to expand it to other coastal cities, including Tripoli and Batroun in the north, and Sidon and Tyre in Lebanon’s south.

The scheme will charge around $3 an hour for bike rental, with monthly subscribers paying a lower rate.

Bike-sharing programmes have proved popular in many major cities, including Paris and London.—AFP

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