Squinting into his binoculars, William Fowlds scans a
vast, grassy plane where a busy dairy once stood. The cattle and sheep have
given way to herds of grazing antelope. Out of a knot of thorny bushes, a family
of elephants emerges.
Waterborne diseases killed at least 46 people in Bombay
in the past four days following floods that crippled western India last month,
officials said Thursday. Press Trust of India news agency on Thursday night put
the death toll at 66.
An international research team has proposed new
techniques that may lead to the mass production of meat reared not on the farm,
but in the laboratory. Developments in tissue engineering mean that cells taken
from animals could be grown directly into meat in a laboratory, the researchers
say.
The first electrical switch made entirely from carbon
nanotubes has been unveiled. Its inventors hope that it could help to replace
silicon chips with faster, cheaper, smaller components.
Scientists have overcome an important hurdle in the race
to develop new antibiotics: they have made bacteria efficiently churn out
chemicals that could prove to be useful drugs.
Hopes for treating disease with stem cells from
umbilical cord blood has received a major boost, following the discovery of
primitive cells with clinical potential matching that of the far more
controversial embryonic stem cells (ESCs). The latter are originally derived
from human fetuses, which are then destroyed, and have become a major ethical
issue, especially in the US.
