Ecological Footprint: Bringing Sustainability to the Planet EARTH

In today’s world, where humanity is already exceeding planetary limits, ecological assets are becoming more critical. Each country has its own ecological risk profile; many are running ecological deficits, with Footprints larger than their own biological capacity. Others depend heavily on resources from elsewhere, which are under increasing pressure.

In some areas of the world, the implications of ecological deficits can be devastating, leading to resource loss, ecosystem collapse, debt, poverty, famine and war.

Footprints indicate how much "nature" is available for a defined population to use, compared to how much it needs to maintain its current activities. Obviously, the size of a footprint will vary depending on the volume and different types of natural resources consumed by a population, which will in turn depend on lifestyle choices, income levels, and technology. Therefore, footprints provide compelling evidence of the impacts of consumption.

The Ecological Footprint is a complex sustainability indicator that answers a simple question: How much of the Earth’s resources does your lifestyle require? Using existing, official statistics that quantify the resources people consume and the waste they generate. The Ecological Footprint is a resource accounting tool that helps countries understand their ecological balance sheet and gives them the data necessary to manage their resources and secure their future.

According to latest Footprint Analysis, humanity is exceeding its ecological limits by 39%. Or, put another way, we would need to have over one third more than the present biocapacity of Earth to maintain the same level of prosperity for future generations.

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Review Article - Changing the Life Style with Green Ideas

You may not be able to reduce global warming, end pollution and save endangered species single-handedly, but by choosing to live an earth-friendly lifestyle you can do a lot every day to help achieve those goals.

And by making wise choices about how you live, and the amount of energy and natural resources you consume, you send a clear message to businesses, politicians and government agencies that value you as a customer, constituent and citizen.

Green Building Materials:

Environmentally conscious home owners can buy hand-hewn wood beams or rough sawn lumber such as oak, cherry, maple or pine, many of which are aged to a density and hardness that you cannot find in new lumber. Reclaimed or salvaged lumber can be used to build walls, as support beams or in roof construction. Many green companies specialize in obtaining building materials from older homes that are about to be torn down or dismantled. Instead of filling up landfills, previously used lumber is put back into new construction.

To provide solar power, solar companies install large, flat panels on top of roofs, and each panel contains grids of solar cells. It works best in wide, open locations that get plenty of sun. Some systems can store energy for use at night or on cloudy days.

Green Flooring Materials:

Green floors are typically made from renewable or recycled products. These non-toxic flooring materials are said to be safe for the environment and for people, and can be installed in an eco-friendly manner without harmful gas emissions.

Bamboo Flooring: Bamboo is a grass, not a wood. It renews itself every 3 to 5 years. Inexpensive bamboo is generally younger and not very durable, so ask for premium bamboo, made from adhesives that do not contain formaldehyde. Bamboo can be nailed, glued, stapled or floated, and comes in horizontal or vertical patterns. Do not install in areas that get wet.

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Gaia Hypothesis

The Gaia hypothesis, a hypothesis put forward to explain a number of paradoxes about life and the earth, was first formulated in the 1960s by the independent research scientist James Lovelock. Until 1975 it was almost totally ignored. An article in the New Scientist of February 15th, 1975, and a popular book length version of the theory, published as The Quest for Gaia, began to attract scientific and critical attention to the hypothesis. Championed by certain environmentalists and scientists, it was vociferously rejected by many others, both within scientific circles and outside of them.

The Gaia hypothesis forms part of what is scientifically referred to as earth system science, and is a class of scientific models of the geo-biosphere in which life as a whole fosters and maintains suitable conditions for itself by helping to create an environment on Earth suitable for its continuity. The first such theory was created by Lovelock, who was working with NASA when he developed his hypotheses in the 1960s. He wrote an article in the science journal Nature, before formally publishing the concept in the 1979 book Gaia: A new look at life on Earth. He hypothesized that the living matter of the planet functioned like a single organism and named this self-regulating living system after the Greek goddess Gaia, using a suggestion from the novelist William Golding

Review Article - Cancer

Cancer is a class of diseases or disorders characterized by uncontrolled division of cells and the ability of these cells to invade other tissues, either by direct growth into adjacent tissue through invasion or by implantation into distant sites by metastasis. Metastasis is defined as the stage in which cancer cells are transported through the bloodstream or lymphatic system. Cancer may affect people at all ages, but risk tends to increase with age. It is one of the leading causes of death in developed countries.Cancers are caused by a series of mutations. Each mutation alters the behavior of the cell somewhat.

The following closely related terms may be used to designate abnormal growths:

• Neoplasia and neoplasm are the accurate, scientific names for this group of diseases as defined in the first paragraph above. This group contains a large number of different diseases; the usual classification is listed below. Neoplasms can be benign or malignant.
• Cancer is a widely used word that is usually understood as synonymous with malignant neoplasm. Occasionally, it is used instead of carcinoma, a sub-group of malignant neoplasms. Because of its overwhelming popularity relative to 'neoplasia', it is used frequently instead of 'neoplasia', even by scientists and physicians, especially when discussing neoplastic diseases as a group.
• Tumor in medical language simply means swelling or lump, either neoplastic, inflammatory or other. In common language, however, it is synonymous with 'neoplasm', either benign or malignant. This is inaccurate since some neoplasms usually do not form tumors, for example leukemia or carcinoma in situ.

        Cancers are classified by the type of cell that resembles the tumor and, therefore, the tissue presumed to be the origin of the tumor. The following general categories are usually accepted:

• Carcinoma: malignant tumors derived from epithelial cells. This group represent the most common cancers, including the common forms of breast, prostate, lung and colon cancer.
• Lymphoma and Leukemia: malignant tumors derived from blood and bone marrow cells
• Sarcoma: malignant tumors derived from connective tissue, or mesenchymal cells
• Mesothelioma: tumors derived from the mesothelial cells lining the peritoneum and the pleura.
• Glioma: tumors derived from glia, the most common type of brain cell
• germ cell tumours: tumors derived from germ cells, normally found in the testicle and ovary
• Choriocarcinoma: malignant tumors derived from the placenta.
• Malignant tumors are usually named using the Latin or Greek root of the organ as a prefix and the above category name as the suffix. For instance, a malignant tumor of liver cells is called hepatocarcinoma; a malignant tumor of the fat cells is called liposarcoma. For common cancers, the English organ name is used. For instance, the most common type of breast cancer is called ductal carcinoma of the breast or mammary ductal carcinoma. Here, the adjective ductal refers to the appearance of the cancer under the microscope, resembling normal breast ducts.
• Benign tumors are named using -oma as a suffix. For instance, a benign tumor of the smooth muscle of the uterus is called leiomyoma (the common name of this frequent tumor is fibroid). This nomenclature is however somewhat inconsistent, since several "malignant" tumor growths also have this suffix in their names, e.g. neuroblastoma, lymphoma and melanoma...........................................................

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Review Article - Vitamin

The word vitamine was coined by the Polish biochemist Casimir Funk in 1912. Vita in Latin is life and the -amine suffix is for amine; at the time it was thought that all vitamins were amines. This is now known to be incorrect.
A Vitamin is an organic molecule required by a living organism in minute amounts for proper health. An organism deprived of all sources of a particular vitamin will eventually suffer from disease symptoms specific to that vitamin. The term vitamin does not encompass other essential nutrients such as dietary minerals, essential fatty acids, or essential amino acids, nor is it used for the large number of other nutrients that merely promote health, but are not strictly essential. Vitamins function in a wide variety of capacities within the body. The most prominent function is as cofactors for enzymatic reactions. The distinguishing feature of the vitamins is that they generally cannot be synthesized by mammalian cells and, therefore, must be supplied in the diet. With few exceptions the body cannot manufacture or synthesize vitamins.  Vitamins and minerals are substances that are found in foods we eat. However, there are a few vitamins that we obtain by other means: for example, microorganisms in the intestine - commonly known as gut flora - produce vitamin K and biotin, while one form of vitamin D is synthesized in the skin with the help of natural ultraviolet sunlight. Vitamins are essential to the normal functioning of our bodies. They are necessary for our growth, vitality, and general well-being.  When it comes to vitamins, each one has a special role to play. For example:

• Vitamin D in milk helps your bones.
• Vitamin A in carrots helps you see at night.
• Vitamin C in oranges helps your body heal if you get a cut. 

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Viruses Can be Used as Battery

Professors Yet-Ming Chiang, Angela Belcher and Paula Hammond from MIT proudly stand with a battery-building virus they have engineered. The virus is on a glass slide held by Belcher, center.

Donna Coveney, MIT

 In Cambridge, Massachusetts, scientists have discovered that some viruses can be helpful in an unusual way. They are putting viruses to work, teaching them to build some of the world’s smallest rechargeable batteries.

Viruses and batteries may seem like an unusual pair, but they’re not so strange for engineer Angela Belcher, who first came up with the idea. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, she and her collaborators bring together different areas of science in new ways. In the case of the virus-built batteries, the scientists combine what they know about biology (the study of living things), technology and production techniques.

Many batteries are already pretty small. You can hold A, C and D batteries in your hand and the coin-like batteries that power watches are often smaller than a penny. However, every year, new electronic devices like personal music players or cell phones get smaller than the year before. As these devices shrink, ordinary batteries won’t be small enough to fit inside.

The ideal battery will store a lot of energy in a small package. Right now, Belcher’s model battery, a metallic disk completely built by viruses, looks like a regular watch battery. But inside, its components are very small—so tiny you can only see them with a powerful microscope.

How small are these battery parts? To get some idea of the size, pluck one hair from your head (unless that seems too painful). Place your hair on a piece of white paper and try to see how wide your hair is—pretty thin, right? Although the width of each person’s hair is a bit different, you could probably fit about 10 of these virus-built battery parts, side to side, across one hair. These microbatteries (“micro” means very small) may change the way we look at viruses.

The battery — the silver-colored disk on the right side of the device — is being used to power an LED.

Eye Tracking for Mobile Control

"EyePhone" lets users browse through mobile phone menus at the blink of an eye.

A team at Dartmouth College has now created an eye-tracking system that lets a user operate a smart phone with eye movement.

Mobile eye tracking could be useful for all mobile phone users, says Dartmouth professor Andrew Campbell, who led the development of the new system, called EyePhone. But so far, little work has been done on eye tracking on mobile phones. This isn't surprising--keeping track of a gaze via a mobile phone is much more challenging than on a desktop computer because both the user and the phone are moving, and the surrounding environment is so changeable.

Researchers Develop Test to Identify 'Best' Sperm

Researchers at Yale School of Medicine have discovered a method to select sperm with the highest DNA integrity in a bid to improve male fertility. The method is comparable to that of the egg's natural selection abilities, according to the study published in the June/July issue of the Journal of Andrology.

“Our results could help address the fact that approximately 40 percent of infertility cases can be traced to male infertility," said the senior author of the study, Gabor Huszar, M.D., director of the Sperm Physiology Lab and senior research scientist in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences at Yale.

Huszar said that past semen analysis focused on sperm concentration and motility. It was assumed that if a man had a high sperm count and active sperm, that he was fertile. But there was no information on the sperm's fertility or its ability to attach to its mark, the female gamete. In an ideal case, the egg naturally selects the optimal sperm, but during in-vitro fertilization treatment of men who had only a few sperm, clinicians did not know whether they were injecting the correct sperm into the egg for fertilization. "We have now found a biochemical marker of sperm fertility so that we can select sperm with high genetic integrity," Huszar said.

Huszar and his colleagues tested the idea that binding sperm to hyaluronic acid selects sperm with high DNA integrity. They studied semen samples from 50 men, and a part of the sperm in the semen was allowed to bind to hyaluronic acid. These sperm were isolated, and the DNA chain integrity was compared to the original sperm in semen. The team used a reagent that stained sperm with high DNA integrity green, whereas sperm with fragmented DNA, and diminished DNA integrity were stained red.

"The sperm with fragmented DNA work like scratched CDs," Huszar said. "They seem to be operational, but when you play them, some of the information is missing. These damaged sperm may also carry chromosomal aberrations that could be related to genetic diseases." Huszar and his colleagues identified the nuclear and cytoplasmic attributes of various sperm. They also identified a key relationship between the ability of sperm to bind to hyaluronic acid and between high sperm genetic integrity, which enhances the sperm's contribution to normal embryo development.

"When sperm is selected with hyaluronic acid binding, they are of comparable, if not better, overall quality than sperm chosen by the oocyte in the natural fertilization process," said Huszar.

Snoring in the First Year of Life

Snoring is considered a risk factor for breathing problems and other sleep-related problems in older children. The purpose of this study was to describe the prevalence of snoring in infants and the factors associated with snoring. The study assessed snoring in 1800 infants using interviewer-administered questionnaire. The prevalence of snoring was 15.8% in the first 4 weeks of life and 26.1% in the past two weeks.

Snoring in the past 2 weeks was associated with increasing age of the infant, male gender, maternal smoking, sleep position, number of respiratory infections and snoring in the first 4 week of life. The authors concluded that snoring is common in infancy. The identified risk factors for snoring are probably causally related to snoring. Further studies are needed to establish whether snoring in infancy is associated with current or subsequent morbidity. 

Making Good, Brown Fat

The energy-burning brown fat cells shown here were made by the skin cells of mice. Green dots are oil droplets, red dots are mitochondria and each blue sphere is the nucleus of a cell.

Shingo Kajimura

Sept. 9, 2009

Not all fats are created equal: There’s white fat, which stores energy. There’s also another kind of human body fat that actually burns energy and heats up. Babies have this kind of fat, and earlier this year, scientists found that adults have it too. Called brown fat, this substance is stored mainly in the upper body.

According to a new study, it may be possible to make brown fat out of other kinds of cells in the body, such as skin cells. A team of researchers, led by Bruce Spiegelman of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass., made brown fat tissue from the skin cells of mice and mouse myoblasts. (A myoblast is a cell that will develop into muscle.)

Because brown fat can burn excess energy, researchers hope it may be used to treat obesity and diabetes. Obesity, which is the condition of being overweight, can lead to other major health problems. Diabetes is a general name given to several different types of illnesses, all of which relate to the body’s ability to manage energy.

There was a difference, however. Normal brown fat cells are able to regulate their energy-burning activity so the human body doesn’t get too hot. The new lab-grown cells, however, are always running on high, which means they’re burning as much energy as possible—which could cause a fever in a person.

The new technique could be used in a number of different ways to help people, says Spiegelman. For example, scientists could remove cells from an obese person, change the cells so they produce brown fat, and return them to the body. Once these altered cells are back in the body, they can produce more brown fat, which would burn energy. Another method may involve injecting an obese person with a compound that could boost his or her production of brown fat cells.

Right now, it’s too early to say whether or not these new brown fat cells will be able to help a person with a weight problem—but the early results are promising.

Global Warming- How Creatures Interact with their Environment

Jan. 20, 2010

Two butterfly species, the small heath (left) and common blue (right), are among those in Central Europe that have become more likely in the last 30 years to have an extra generation in the same year. Since 1980, average temperatures there have also risen.

F. Altermatt

Altermatt is an ecologist — a scientist who studies how creatures interact with their environment — who works at the University of California, Davis. In a new study, he and other researchers looked at changes in the reproduction patterns of butterflies and moths in Central Europe.

Over the last 30 years, the average temperature in Central Europe has gone up about 1.5 degrees Celsius. During that same time, 44 species of moths and butterflies in an area around Basel, Switzerland, have added an extra generation to their numbers during some years, Altermatt found. That means that if butterflies of one of these species used to reproduce once per year, they now sometimes reproduce twice. And if they used to reproduce twice, they now sometimes reproduce three times. These extra generations didn’t show up in this location before 1980.

The temperature increase, 1.5 degrees, may not seem like much, but it’s about the difference between the body temperature of a healthy person and someone with a low-grade fever. Altermatt also says that the increase in temperature speeds up the development of the insects, so they’re ready to reproduce earlier in their lives.

This was no small study: He and his colleagues watched butterflies and moths outdoors and also looked at historical records for more than 1,100 types of the creatures. Of those species, 263 are known to produce one or two extra generations in the location studied — but not always; only when the temperatures heat up. Altermatt found, however, that since 1980, a majority of those species started adding generations more often.

Altermatt also does research in evolution, which is the study of how species, or groups of the same creature, change over time. Every time an insect — or animal, plant or other organism — reproduces, the offspring might be slightly different from its parent. These differences could give the offspring a better chance of survival in the world. In this case, Altermatt thinks the additional butterfly generations may speed up evolution — and perhaps give them a better chance of survival in the face of climate change. On the other hand, maybe these changes won’t make a difference: Altermatt doesn’t know whether the extra generations of butterflies and moths survived.

Scientists who study the effects of climate change like to look at patterns such as insect populations because they are easy to track — and easy to connect to a warming world. And by studying such visible effects of climate change, scientists might be able to better predict the changes ahead for other populations — like humans.

Scientists Observe Liquid Water Below Freezing

It is known to all that water turns to ice below 0 °C. But now scientists have found that beyond that, or below about -75 °C, the ice may turn back into liquid water. Previously, scientists have predicted this phase transition with computer simulations, but recent experiments may have finally demonstrated the existence of this ultra-cold Water.

The Prostrate Gland

The Prostate Gland is a part of the male reproductive system and it is located around the neck of the urinary bladder. Cancer of the prostate has high prevalence in USA with much lower figures among Asians. This variation may be because of genetic factors or dietary differences.

A recent research has revealed that tomatos have a protective effect against prostate cancer. Tomatos contain lycopene, a minor nutrient and antioxident, found in high quantities and Ketosamines FruHis............ To know more about how tomato is used as a cure of Postrate Cancer and various other notes visit www.myonotes.blogspot.com