Author: Ranveer Kumar

Steven Donziger has been detained at home since August 2019, the result of a Kafkaesque legal battle stemming from his crusade on behalf of Indigenous Amazonians Many of us will have felt the grip of claustrophobic isolation over the past year, but the lawyer Steven Donziger has experienced an extreme, very personal confinement as a pandemic arrived and then raged around him in New York City. On Sunday, Donziger reached his 600th day of an unprecedented house arrest that has resulted from a sprawling, Kafkaesque legal battle with the oil giant Chevron. Donziger spearheaded a lengthy crusade against the company…

A federal judge blocked new oil and gas leasing and fracking in Ohio’s Wayne National Forest, a popular destination for outdoor recreation and the only National Forest located in the vast state. The ruling rebuked the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for failing to consider threats to public health, endangered species, and watersheds before opening more than 40,000 acres of the forest to fracking last year. Pending completion of new environmental reviews, the March 9 order blocks new leases, prohibits new drilling permits and surface disturbance on existing leases, and prohibits water withdrawals from the Little…

Key Takeaways A new study from the United Kingdom has found that adults living with children appear to be at a slightly increased risk of getting COVID-19 compared to adults who do not live with kids. The increase was only seen with the second wave of the pandemic in England and not with the first wave. Additionally, the risk was higher depending on the age of the children, with a slightly higher risk for adults living with children aged 12 to 18. The researchers also noted that adults younger than age 65 who lived with children under the age of…

BOSTON – (March 25, 2021) – A mechanism has been identified that explains how physical exercise in pregnancy confers metabolic health benefits in offspring. According to researchers, the key lies with a protein called SOD3, vitamin D and adequate exercise, with the outcomes possibly forming the first steps to designing rational diet and exercise programs to use during pregnancy and particularly when mothers may also be overweight or obese. The study, which was led by authors from the Joslin Diabetes Center at the Harvard Medical School and colleagues from Japan, the US, Canada and Denmark, has been published online by Cell Metabolism. We’ve…

Divers practicing blackwater photography are helping marine scientists gain new insights into fish larvae. “There’s a whole lot of nothing,” he said. “There’s no bottom, no walls, just this space that goes to infinity. And one thing you realize is there are a lot of sea monsters there, but they’re tiny.” Of course, there are big monsters, too, like sharks. But the creatures Mr. Milisen is referring to are part of a daily movement of larval fish and invertebrates, which rise from the depths to the surface each evening as part of one of the largest migrations of organisms on…

Motivated by our growing problem with plastics, which are environmentally damaging both to produce and after they’re disposed of, scientists are tinkering away with more eco-friendly forms of the material. Researchers at Yale University have put forward a candidate that ticks a number of important boxes, developing a new bioplastic with high strength but an ability to degrade entirely in the space of three months. The pursuit of more environmentally friendly bioplastics has seen scientists turn to all sorts of biomass as their starting point. These possibilities include egg shells, plants and even tequila waste, and all invariably raise the prospect of a material…

PULLMAN, Wash. – Washington State University researchers have discovered a protein that could be key to blocking the most common bacterial cause of human food poisoning in the United States. Chances are, if you’ve eaten undercooked poultry or cross contaminated food by washing raw chicken, you may be familiar with the food-borne pathogen. “Many people that get sick think, ‘oh, that’s probably Salmonella,’ but it is even more likely it’s Campylobacter,” said Nick Negretti (’20 Ph.D.), a lead member of the research team in Michael Konkel’s Laboratory in WSU’s School of Molecular Biosciences. According to a study on the research recently published in Nature…

Drug companies raised the price of insulin about 10% each time a new type of insulin cleared the third and the final stages toward Food and Drug Administration approval, according to new research that sheds light on a health system that benefits companies more than patients. In a study published March 8 in Health Economics, researchers found that from 2007 through 2015, pharmaceutical companies raised the price of existing insulin drugs about $2.35 per milliliter in the quarter after a potential competitor cleared stage-three FDA trials. Companies then raised the price per milliliter $2 28 in the quarter after…

Australia at high risk of pesticide pollution. Pollutants from agrochemicals and pesticides can disrupt the ecosystem and risk harming human health, despite greatly contributing to food security in the last half-decade. Now, researchers from the University of Sydney had conducted a comprehensive risk assessment of global pesticide pollution. The team, led by Fiona Tang, found that 64% of global agricultural land (around 24.5 million km2) is at risk of pollution from pesticides, and 31% is at high risk – some of which is in Australia. About a third of the regions within the high-risk areas had high biodiversity – that is,…

Rice University lab’s optimized flash process could reduce carbon emissions HOUSTON – (March 29, 2021) – This could be where the rubber truly hits the road. Rice University scientists have optimized a process to convert waste from rubber tires into graphene that can, in turn, be used to strengthen concrete. The environmental benefits of adding graphene to concrete are clear, chemist James Tour said. “Concrete is the most-produced material in the world, and simply making it produces as much as 9% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions,” Tour said. “If we can use less concrete in our roads, buildings and…