Feature Article

After declaring 43 industrial areas in India as critically polluted and imposing a moratorium on their expansion, the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests is going easy on them. As many as 23 critically polluted areas have been removed from the moratorium list since last October on the basis of inadequate action plans submitted by the respective states.

Work on a dictionary that promises to improve our knowledge of an ancient civilisation has been completed 90 years after it began, outliving nearly 100 lexicographers who worked on it.

Kate Forde believes dirt is precious to life.

Taiwan is stopping the use of Chinese characters—the script used in mainland China—on official websites.

In the spring of 2010, when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig was spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, cyber activist Eli Pariser asked two friends to google the term “BP”.

The film begins with images of a gushing stream, birds chirping and a typical audio overlay of the santoor that captures any pristine environment.

Corruption seems to have become a much maligned word of late. Rightly so. It’s not just fresh from the oven scams like those related to the Commonwealth Games, Indian Premier League (IPL) or 2G spectrum that are getting media attention. Old cases like those pertaining to the Bhopal gas tragedy have found a new lease of life in the media. One minister has lost his job due to the alleged impropriety in IPL dealings, a senior politician is in prison because of alleged irregularities in the business of Commonwealth Games, and the 2G spectrum case has led to a plethora of corporate honchos cooling their heels in jail in company of ex-ministers and powerful politicians.

If you happen to see a swarm of butterflies flying above the terrace of your office in the crowded Bengaluru city, count yourself lucky. You are witness to the largest annual butterfly migration in southern India. Every year between October and December, swarms of Dark Blue Tiger and Double Branded Brown Crow fly through the Bengaluru-Mysore area to their summer homes in the evergreen forests of Sahyadri in the Western Ghats. There they crowd in dense congregation for weeks, court and breed.

It’s a bit of Iraq and Afghanistan out there on the Internet. Just like the invasion of Iraq was lies, deceit and regime change as George W Bush chased illusory weapons of mass destruction in that hapless country, on the Internet, too, there is an element of fabrication and duplicity as the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unit of the Department of Homeland Security goes about seizing domain names and shutting them down en masse claiming they are all violating intellectual property rights (IPRS).

Health
Dirty truth


If you stop your children from eating mud, read this. Craving for earth—geophagy—can be one of the natural ways to protect stomach against pathogens. After studying 480 reports and analysing theories that geophagy is driven by hunger and for nutrients in the soil like iron, zinc or calcium the researchers found that protection against pathogens was recurring in the data. The study points out that geophagy is mostly found in women in the early stages of pregnancy and in pre-adolescent children—both sensitive to pathogens. The Quarterly Review of Biology, June