It was reported a few days ago that some 10 billion pounds of airborne pollutants from Asia — ranging from soot to mercury to carbon dioxide to ozone — reach within the borders of the US annually, quoting numerous scientific estimates.

But the pollution figures that scientists studying the impact of Asian, and mostly Chinese, environmental waste in the atmosphere have suggested are more than alarming.

The real impact of the Asian Tigers, helped by their giant brother, China, which is now thought to have overtaken the US in emissions of greenhouse gases, may amount to a kind of colonization of the United States, and by extension, North America, potentially destabilizing weather patterns across the North Pacific and masking the effects of global warming.

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And the Europeans are ready to spend US$ 130 million annually to enliven the old adage - an apple a day keeps the doctor away - as well as improve their carbon footprint by promoting greener consumption.

But Europe is also grappling with weight as a serious health issue and now a strategy to fight obesity in kids is being pushed through European parliament to provide free fresh fruits and vegetables to school children.

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Researchers at University of Oklahoma are reportedly working to create a sensor to detect bio-marker gases exhaled in the breath of a person with cancer, picking up on earlier studies showing that dogs can detect cancer by sniffing the exhaled breath of cancer patients.

In a study published two years ago, it was found that dogs identified breast and lung cancer patients with accuracies of 88% and 97%, respectively by smelling breath samples.

It has been proven elsewhere that gas-phase molecules are uniquely associated with cancer but the team will use nanotechnology to improve laser performance and shrink laser systems, which would allow battery-powered operation of a hand held sensor device.

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Their beefs is that they cannot be found on online maps.

Apart from the fact, as stated by Mary Spence, president of the British Cartographic Society, that online maps missed out on important or key points of interest such as centuries old cathedrals, royal castles and other stately homes, they were also effectively diminishing from national consciousness the British sense of nationhood.

You see, monuments that describe the British pride like Stonehenge, a prehistoric monument located in the English county of Wiltshire, about 3.2 kilometers west of Amesbury and 13 kilometers north of Salisbury, should be found on any serious map. But it is not referenced on Google Map for instance.

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The two tribes lived there in a plum lakeside community when the Sahara Desert, as we know it, was a lush, green country, but were separated by effects of climate change over a time line of 1,000 years.

The mystery of the lost tribes of the green Sahara has been unraveled by a joint team of archaeologists and palaeontologists who were out on a dinosaur-hunting expedition in the Ténéré Desert in present-day Niger but instead stumbled on a large, Stone Age graveyard.

Now whatever little may be known about the Kiffian and Tenerian tribes, thought to have lived in the Sahara between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago are bone harpoons, earthen pots, among other artifacts.

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A new futurist concept that encompasses green building technology and—according to the developer—can house up to a million people, will make a debut at the world stage in October.

The 2.3 square kilometer Ziggurat Project, undertaken by Timelinks, a Dubai based environmental design company, will be 100 per cent carbon neutral and will run by harnessing the power of nature setting a futuristic pace for eco-friendliness for other similar projects in the pipeline.

Borrowing from ancient ingenuity, the inhabitants won’t even have any use for a car: transport throughout the complex would be connected by an integrated 360 degree network (horizontally and vertically) so cars would be redundant. Biometrics would provide security with facial recognition technology.

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Now experts are warning of the danger to humanity this lifestyle may be posing. Most of these diseases, identified in medical terms as zoonotic because of their ability to jump from animal to man, have been labeled as “emerging infectious diseases” or EIDs.

Over 60 percent of the 1,415 infectious diseases currently known to modern medicine are capable of infecting both humans and animals. Most of these diseases originated in animals and now infect people and include viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa and helminths, with 175 pathogenic species associated with diseases considered to be ‘emerging’.

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Not that the 100 billion pieces of junk mail Americans receive each year are irksome enough or that the emissions of junk mail are equal to those of over nine million cars or 51 million tons of greenhouse gases.

The group estimates that every year, more than 100 million trees are cut down to make junk mail - the equivalent of clear-cutting all of Rocky Mountain National Park every 4 months!

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The tongue was invented by Cecilia Jiménez-Jorquera and her colleagues at the famed institution and is reported in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal, The Analyst. She said of her innovation: “The device is based on similar principles to the human tongue and is sensitive to just five different tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, acidic and umami (savory).

Our results have demonstrated the potential of using multi-sensors as electronic tongues not only for distinguishing the samples according to the grape variety and the vintage year, but also for quantitative prediction of several sample parameters.”

Could these be “green” attributes of the new tongue, someone? It is said to be fast, portable, cheap to manufacture, and can be trained to “taste” new varieties as required.

As expected, since the reports, views and counter-views (over a glass of wine, of course) have been parlayed in hundreds of forums including blogs and even radio and TV talk shows in Spain but this certainly does not mark the death of the art of wine tasting.

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She gathered all her inner strength and courage to cross a crocodile infested river near her home deep in the arid Masai warrior tribe country with her father and her wannabe husband in hot pursuit.

Betty Lason, now 17 and still in primary school, said recently that she vividly remembers the incident six years ago because she executed her plan one evening after returning to her new husband’s home from day-long sheep and goat herding in the bush under the scorching sun.

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Roads and parking lots as solar collectors? Is that the newest revolutionary innovation since the term “alternative energy”? Capturing solar energy from pavements has been perfected for years now.

Researchers at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute will unveil Tuesday, August 19, 2008 the findings of a research project on the concept of using the heat absorbed by pavements. Rajib Mallick, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, who was the team leader will hail the achievement as “revolutionary”.

By using the heat from asphalt, the researchers have developed a solar collector that could turn roads and parking lots into invisible and cheap sources of electricity and hot water.

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Eldoret is the bread basket of Kenya’s athletics elite and famous runners, including Kipchoge Keino who made history by winning the east African country’s first gold medal in the 1500 meters run at the Mexico City Games.

But the town is also home to Hanna Jeruto, a 24 year old HIV+ mother who exclusively breastfeeds her 4 month old son, Kipruto. Kipruto, however, is HIV negative and when she was delivering at the provincial hospital doctors had advised her not to breastfeed him.

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How much wind blows from Nouakchott to Natal, and how much of this is ever utilized as an alternative energy source? How much water flowing in the Zambezi is used to power villages in Zambia and Zimbabwe; and how much more of the great Nile waters that flow into the Mediterranean can sustainably be harnessed to run corn mills in Nakuru and cotton ginneries in Jinja and Khartoum or fisheries in Cairo?

And now some bold African should emulate John McCain. He may be better known for his tenacity inside the muddle of US politics than for his expertise on the quest for cleaner energy sources. But many surely gaped at the figures he offered for a battery to power America’s engines in the wake of the oil price burst recently.

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A large part of the excitement, however, is not that Henry seems to be racing against time but he is enjoying the company of three mates in his sunset years. He has lived long, though, with his species having a lifespan of about 70 years in the wild.

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1957 AD: A young Swiss agronomist goes to Africa, the dark continent, to manage a coffee plantation at the foot of the ice-capped mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s tallest; a few years later, he gets another brief - to produce food - fruit and vegetables - for cement factory workers, many of whom were undernourished, as well as spruce up the area surrounding the site.

1970 AD: Dr Haller starts a unique ecological experiment, attempting to rehabilitate the limestone quarries scarring the Mombasa coastline, including the 7 square kilometer Bamburi cement quarry site from a barren and dusty lunar landscape to an ecological haven.

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The team is part of a joint initiative of University of Stellenbosch and the Danish biotechnology firm, Aresa, which has developed the “RedDetect” bio-sensor technology in a weed called Thales Cress.

The weed changes color from green to autumnal red when it detects nitrogen dioxide leaching from mines buried in the soil.

Because the weed is too small to be seen from a safe distance, the scientists went looking for a more viable alternative, and landed on the tobacco plant, which grows easily in most parts of the world, with a little help from genetic engineering.

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Medina Palms also supports a billfish tagging initiative to monitor fish populations in the Indian Ocean by The Billfish Foundation, a non profit dedicated to conserving and enhancing billfish populations around the world.

The Foundation claims that over 90% of marlin mortality is the result of bycatch in commercial fisheries outside the US yet tremendous pressure continues to be placed on oceans from fishing fleets trying to meet the demands of a hungry world.

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The watchdog this week ruled The Great Global Warming Swindle unfairly portrays several scientists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and that it broke rules in the Broadcasting Code.

Ofcom’s investigation found that the IPCC, the former government chief scientist, Sir David King, and Professor Carl Wunsch, were treated unfairly in the documentary that attempted to use a cast of the world’s top scientists to debunk the global warming theory.

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But it has taken six painstaking years to achieve this milestone with 10 syringe factories licensed in between. Health experts estimate that more than half of the 16 billion annual injections in poorer countries are done with non sterile syringes or needles, many of which are often just rinsed in tepid water between injections.

“There have been too many set backs to remember now, but also a steady recognition, acceptance and ground swell of demand for Auto-Disable syringes especially in developing world countries. At times we have all felt that we were going backwards faster than forwards”, he says.

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Stinking or controversial as it may have been, China now has the wonderful opportunity to stock “legally obtained” African ivory in the mix of those acquired illegally in a superbly coordinated international ring that continues to deplete Africa of its wildlife resources.

Chinese nationals have been implicated in illegal ivory seizures in more than 20 African nations in the last few years.

What’s worse, the Convention for International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), a 173-nation agreement charged with ensuring a sustainable international trade in wild animals and plants, has sanctioned it all.

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