Feature Article

To protect the health of humans, save other species. That's the message from Eric Chivian and Aaron Bernstein from Harvard Medical School in Boston, who say that human health depends crucially on biodiversity.

There may be more to global warming than we thought. On top of the effect of human-made carbon emissions, natural changes in the warm ocean currents travelling to the icy north may be helping to heat up the entire northern hemisphere.

Rich nations, including the US and UK, are planning to push rapidly industrialising nations like China and India into accepting "back door" limits on their greenhouse gas emissions. They want climate negotiators to agree global technical standards on "dirty" manufacturing industries like aluminium, iron and steel, cement and chemicals - standards that would apply equally to factories in the US, Italy or India, for example. This strategy emerged last week in meetings at the Royal Society in London to discuss the successor to the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012.

RAPD analysis of DNA isolated from soils under Ker and associated open areas of Bikaner, Kodamdesar and Nagaur regions of western Rajasthan was carried out using six primers to find out the effect of Ker (Capparis deciduas) plants on microbial diversity.

The aim of this study was to find out the impact of climate change, if any, on the phenophases of 11 multipurpose tree species, growing as block plantation at one site, during eight years (1999

Decline in national wheat productivity, and stagnation of yield in the national Advanced Varietal Trials in the past decade are partly attributed to high temperature stress during the period of grain-filling. In view of the predicted global warming, terminal heat stress is likely to increase.

The sea-ice cover in the polar regions is one of the most expansive and seasonal geophysical parameters on the earth's surface. The presence or absence of sea-ice affects the atmosphere and the ocean, and therefore the climate in many ways. In this study we have used the Multi-frequency Scanning Microwave Radiometer (MSMR) brightness temperature data over the Antarctic/Southern Ocean region to calculate the weekly sea-ice extents, during the melting phase from August 1999 to March 2000 to quantitatively estimate the melting rates of sea-ice on a hemispheric scale.

Extreme rainfall events today pose a serious threat to many populated and urbanized areas worldwide. An accurate estimate of frequency and distribution of these events can significantly aid in policy planning and observation system design. We report here a highresolution (10 km) analysis of heavy rainfall episodes (defined as 24-h rainfall exceeding 250 mm) over the Indian region.

Chemometric techniques such as factor analysis (FA),cluster analysis (CA) and discriminant analysis (DA) were applied to the groundwater quality data in a tannery-polluted area of Chennai city, India.

Environmental isotope techniques have been employed to identify the recharge areas of springs in India, in order to construct artificial recharge structures for rainwater harvesting and groundwater augmentation for their rejuvenation. A model project was taken up in the mountainous region of Gaucher