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Over one lakh turtles died along Orissa coast in last 10 years mainly due to illegal trawling, environmental watchdog Greenpeace claimed on Sunday and asked the state government to allocate Rs 11 crore to step up patrolling against unlawful fishing and help fishermen.

“Independent studies suggest turtle mortalities remain in the range of 10,000 to 15,000 every year across the Orissa coast. This amounts to over 100,000 dead olive ridley turtles washed ashore in last 10 years,” it said in an approach paper titled “turning seas of trouble into seas of plenty”.

Though government estimates showed drop in mortality from 13,575 in 1997-98 to 3,242 in 2006-07, Sanjiv Gopal of Greenpeace, releasing the approach paper here said casualty could be much higher as all carcasses would not wash ashore.

Seeking quick steps for effective management of Orissa’s marine resources, he said the current turtle season should bring a change for the fishing community and the olive ridley turtles if the government implements existing instruments to ensure sustainable management.

Sustainable fisheries management would safeguard the livelihood of over 4.5 lakh traditional fishermen, hit by falling fish catches in near shore waters, Greenpeace said.

It said the Forest department needs to progressively reduce turtle mortality over next five seasons.

Stating that it had submitted an estimate of Rs 2.02 crore to boost forest department’s turtle protection machinery and Rs nine crore for compensation and alternative income generation schemes for affected fishermen, the watchdog said so far this money has not been allocated by the state government.

The Greenpeace approach paper expressed the hope that through committed efforts the turtle mortality for the upcoming season would be reduced by 35 percent and the goal at the end of five years would see mortalities reduced from the current average of 12,500 to 2400.

Welcoming the recent deployment of two new patrol boats by the fisheries department, Gopal said improved patrolling and consistent presence of authorities at sea would curtail illegal trawling.

The approach paper also asked the state government to allocate adequate resources to tackle the fishery crisis, both by providing patrolling and enforcement resources as well as compensation and alternative means of livelihood for traditional fishermen affected by fishing restrictions.

Underlining the need for strict enforcement of existing laws, it said though Orissa Marine Fishing Regulation Act, 1982 and directives of the Central empowered committee of the Supreme Court (2004) clearly spell out responsibilities of the state government authorities, implementation of the laws has been weak.

A state-of-the-art, solar powered version of the humble cycle-rickshaw promises to offer a solution to urban India’s traffic woes, chronic pollution and fossil fuel dependence, as well as an escape from backbreaking human toil.

The “soleckshaw”, unveiled this month in New Delhi, is a motorised cycle rickshaw that can be pedalled normally or run on a 36-volt solar battery.

Developed by the state-run Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), prototypes are receiving a baptism of fire by being road-tested in Old Delhi’s Chandni Chowk area.

One of the city’s oldest and busiest markets, dating back to the Moghul era, Chandni Chowk comprises a byzantine maze of narrow, winding streets, choked with buses, cars, scooters, cyclists and brave pedestrians.

“The most important achievement will be improving the lot of rickshaw drivers,” said Pradip Kumar Sarmah, head of the non-profit Centre for Rural Development.

“It will dignify the job and reduce the labour of pedalling. From rickshaw pullers, they will become rickshaw drivers,” Sarmah said.

India has an estimated eight million cycle-rickshaws.

The makeover includes FM radios and powerpoints for charging mobile phones during rides.

Gone are the flimsy metal and wooden frames that give the regular Delhi rickshaws a tacky, sometimes dubious look.

The “soleckshaw,” which has a top speed of 15 kilometres (9.3 miles) per hour, has a sturdier frame and sprung, foam seats for up to three people.

The fully-charged solar battery will power the rickshaw for 50 to 70 kilometres (30 to 42 miles). Used batteries can be deposited at a centralised solar-powered charging station and replaced for a nominal fee.

If the tests go well, the “soleckshaw” will be a key transport link between sporting venues at the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi.

“Rickshaws were always environment friendly. Now this gives a totally new image that would be more acceptable to the middle-classes,” said Anumita Roychoudhary of the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment.

“Rickshaws have to be seen as a part of the solution for modern traffic woes and pollution. They have never been the problem. The problem is the proliferation of automobiles using fossil fuels,” she said.

Initial public reaction to the “soleckshaw” has been generally favourable, and the rickshaw pullers have few doubts about its benefits.

“Pedalling the rickshaw was very difficult for me,” said Bappa Chatterjee, 25, who migrated to the capital from West Bengal and is one of the 500,000 pullers in Delhi.

“I used to suffer chest pains and shortage of breath going up inclines. This is so much easier.

“Earlier, when people hailed us it was like, ‘Hey you rickshaw puller!’ Police used to harass us, slapping fines even abusing us for what they called wrong parking. Now people look at me with respect,” Chatterjee said.

Mohammed Matin Ansari, another migrant from eastern Bihar state, said the new model offered parity with car, bus and scooter drivers.

“Now we are as good as them,” he said.

Indian authorities have big dreams for the “soleckshaw.”

India’s Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal who hailed the invention for its “zero carbon foot print” said it should be used beyond the confines of Delhi.

“Soleckshaws would be ideal for small families visiting the Taj Mahal,” he told media.

At present battery-operated buses ferry people to the iconic monument in Agra — but their limited numbers cannot cope with the heavy tourist rush.

CSIR director Sinha said he hoped an advanced version of the “soleckshaw” with a car-like body would become a viable alternative to the “small car” favoured by Indian middle class families.

“Greenhouse gas emissions are showing an increasing trend year on year and 60 percent of this comes from the global transport sector.

“In the age of global warming, the soleckshaw, with improvements, can be successfully developed as competition for all the petrol and diesel run small cars,” Sinha said.

It is us, humans, who have been ruining this great earth into garbage and rubbles for our selfishness. We have been destroying the green trees like anything and making this place unlivable for our future generations. It is only recently where we have realized that we should do something for our earth. There are smaller things like buying organic tote bags only and other stuff like which help us in our aim of making our place greener.

No one knows that recycled sports bottles can be reused again. Such ignorance has been costing us a great deal when it comes to making the earth greener. Buying only promotional USB will also help in our goal of making this place greener.

The products like organic tote bags help immensely by way of preserving the green by reusing them and using only organic materials. They also will not pollute our earth unlike their polythene counterparts.

Recycled cards are another way to help make this place a better one to live. They are reused once and can be reused many times.

If only if we vow that to only buy green promotional products like the tote bags, etc we can actually help in smaller ways to make this place greener.

A new research has shown that elephants use rumble vocalizations that can transmit over one and a half miles, in an attempt to contact other tuskers in their herd, which can be called as their version of “phone a friend”.

According to a report on a private channel, the finding helps to explain how elephants almost always find their way back to their herd, even after they wander far off. Elephants can see and smell their fellow herd members over long distances too, but visual obstructions, such as rocks, trees and even other big animals, can block their views, while wind changes and smells can compromise odor detection. “The auditory system seems to provide a method to detect and communicate with individuals over both long and short distances, and we know that individuals can use auditory information to determine the location and identity of herd members,” lead author Katherine Leighty explained. Leighty, a behavioral ecologist at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Florida, and her team conducted the first systematic study of spontaneously produced elephant rumble vocalizations. These are typically infrasonic calls, with frequencies between 13 and 35 Hz, which fall outside the range of human hearing. Their test subjects were five unrelated adult female African elephants at the spacious Disney Bay Lake site. Each elephant was outfitted with a GPS system and recorder attached to a collar made out of fire hose. The scientists discovered that like a person answering a phone call, elephants that detected a rumble would often rumble back. But, the elephants were more inclined to answer if they had a close affiliation with the caller. In addition to influencing elephant responses, these kinds of associations also affected approach behaviors, with closely affiliated elephants tending to move toward each other during rumble exchanges. The elephants sometimes even appear to blow off detected rumbles. “It could be similar to when a person overhears another speaking,” Leighty said. “They may not respond, but that doesn’t mean it was not heard,” she added. According to Iain Douglas Hamilton, founder of the charity Save the Elephants, believes the research represents “a significant advance in our understanding of elephant communication and a building block towards a wider understanding of how individuals interact to make group decisions.” The study also revealed that the further apart two affiliated elephants were, the stronger their rumbles became. “This accords with what we see in the wild, that the longer individuals have been separated, the stronger the greeting ceremony when they come together, in which deep rumbling plays a significant role,” said Hamilton.

Researchers from Emory University have found that chimps have a unique ability to recognize the faces of group members with photos of their behinds.

They found that the primates carry a mental representation of “whole body” of the chimps they meet.

During the study, primatologists Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny of the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia recruited six adult chimpanzees and focused on how wre these animals able to link pictures of various chimpanzee behinds, either male or female, with photos of individual chimp faces.

A chimp was first shown a photo of a chimp’’s behind, including genitals, then the faces of two chimps, both of the same sex as that behind.

Each of three male and three female chimps were able to make the correct face-with-behind pairing with a higher probability.

However, there was a loophole. The chimps succeeded in recognizing only if the faces were of chimps they knew.

“They were not only seeing the photographs as representations of chimps they knew, but linked the face and behind by drawing upon a mental representation of the whole body of those chimps,” New Scientist quoted de Waal, as saying.

Primatologist Agnes Lacreuse of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, said that more experiments are needed before we can conclude that chimps identify other chimps using a “gender construct” method.

“We know that macaques are able to categorize faces as males or females, so it would be very surprising if chimpanzees were unable to do so,” Lacreuse added.

In another experiment, de Waal and Pokorny studied the chimps” ability to recognise the sex of other chimps from photos of their faces alone.

The primates were first shown a photo of either a generic male or female chimp rear end – a sexually charged stimulus.

The chimps were then shown closely cropped photos of two chimps, one male and one female, and made to select the face of the same sex as the rear end.

The study showed that the chimps by far succeeded, but again only if the faces belonged to chimps they knew.

According to the De Waal, the findings suggest that chimps may operate with a “gender construct” – that is, the chimps recognise the sex of other chimps based, not just on physical attributes, but on other information from their previous experience with those individuals, such as their roles in the larger group.

Surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were warmer over the last 10 years than any time during the last 1,300 years, according to a study.

If climate scientists include the somewhat controversial data derived from tree-ring records, the warming is anomalous (deviating from the normal or common order) for at least 1,700 years.

“Some have argued that tree-ring data is unacceptable for this type of study,” said Michael Mann, associate professor of meteorology and geosciences and director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Centre.

“Now we can eliminate tree rings and still have enough data from other so-called ‘proxies’ to derive a long-term Northern Hemisphere temperature record.”

The proxies used by the researchers included information from marine and lake sediment cores, ice cores, coral cores and tree rings.

“We looked at a much expanded database and our methods are more sophisticated than those used previously,” said Mann.

The researchers noted that “conclusions are less definitive for the Southern Hemisphere and globe, which we attribute to larger uncertainties arising from the sparser available proxy data in the Southern Hemisphere”.

The research team included Mann, Ray Bradley, university distinguished professor, geosciences and director of Climate System Research Centre at the University of Massachusetts; Malcolm Hughes, regents’ professor, and Fenbiao Ni, research associate at the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research, University of Arizona; Zhihua Zhang and Sonya Miller, research associates, meteorology, Penn State; and Scott Rutherford, assistant professor of environmental sciences at Roger Williams University.

Results of this study without tree-ring data show that for the Northern Hemisphere, the last 10 years are unusually warm for not just the past 1,000 as reported in the 1990s paper and others, but for at least another 300 years going back to about A.D. 700 without using tree-ring data. The same conclusion holds back to A.D. 300 if the researchers include tree-ring data.

“Ten years ago, we could not simply eliminate all the tree-ring data from our network because we did not have enough other proxy climate records to piece together a reliable global record,” said Mann.

“With the considerably expanded networks of data now available, we can indeed obtain a reliable long-term record without using tree rings,” he added.

The new study shows that, with caveats, tree-ring data can be used, but that even without including that data, it is clear that the anomalous nature of recent warmth, which most scientists believe to be a result of human impacts on climate, is a reality.

These findings were published on Tuesday’s online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

If you do,what state or body of water???

Me & few eco-friendly friendly clam diggers help clean up NY waters but some times the town n state refuse to dipose of the bagged trash,so we let loose on them comes election day,thats called pay back.Clean it up or watch your beautiful area’s turn into a landfill.

we did 3 years ago with all of the schools ,some citizens and even the army lend a hand .

we took kids from one town to go to the next to help there and so on hitting five towns
so everybody ended up helping another town
it was covered by the local media ,and we ended in the lagoons at the beach ,where all the trash ends up that is dumped on the edges of the river of the towns we cleaned

we collected over 40 tons of trash
had trucks and tractors helping us and quite a few launches
the operation took 6 months to plan

but now 3 years later
all is back to the same state

the Adult population does not care
and continues dumping trash by the river

this is Guerrero in Mexico,
we cleaned the riversides and lagoons and beach of the Atoyac river,
and also cleaned the main streets in the towns .

People came out and gave money ,food and drinks to the kids who were cleaning.

We still clean the river sides in front of the place where i live
periodically

Something in a hue that would allow them to blend into the summertime Vermont countryside?

better to leave them white,, if u dye them,, they will absorb more heat,, especially during summer time,and become exhausted. ,, the whiter they are,, the better
, but anyway,, yeah, henna is the best,, it is a type of leave that leaves orange- brown colour in normal skin,, but its not permanent. Indian use them for wedding ceremonies

Sweet sorghum cultivation needs 5000 m3 of water per hectare that you can get from the sea for 3 kwh of electric energy per m3 of irrigation water.

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you are a proponent of using bagasse, or the pulp and plant material left over after the sugar cane has been pressed, then using the sugar syrup as a source of sugar for ethanol production, then using the bagasse, burning it I assume, as an energy source to 1. produce ethanol, and 2 produce energy to desalinate water, in the desert, is that correct? If that is correct, I have the following observations:
1. Using bagasse as a source of energy is a well documented fact. On the big Island of Hawaii, on the Hamakua Coast, the production of sugar cane bagasse was more important than the actual sugar produced, the bagasse was of course burned for the production of electricity on the Hana side of the island. It has been sorely missed since the Hamakua sugar cane operation shut down. There are many other examples so that energy source is proven.
2. If the site of the proposed production is in the desert, there should be a wealth of solar energy also, so that could be used to supplement the energy requirements.
3. growing sugar cane on site may not be feasible, as sugar cane does best with frequent watering and mild temperatures, the desert can be very extreme, heat and cold, however, that might be overcome by selecting a variety that is resistant to extreme temperatures….
4. Ethanol production is a well documented methodology, and some of the newer stills are extremely energy efficient, so that should be ok too….
5. using the excess energy from the ethanol production to desalinate water is somewhat ‘iffy’, in that the amount of excess energy available and the amount to convert the water is unknown…
Good thinking, do a little engineering on the btu’s available from the bagasse, the supplemental energy needed from solar, depending upon whether you are advocating using direct solar or solar panels, also, amount of water and quality of the water needed to grow the cane, if there are resistant forms that will thrive in the desert, how much product would be available for sale, that is the ethanol, and desalted water, what your markets would potentially be, eg. are you going to market the ethanol as a fuel or as a drink, are you going to market the water as a drink or as a means of irrigation, so yeah, would the project qualify for any tax credits or grants, you get kudos for thinking-crunch the numbers, you may find some potential drawbacks, but good luck and keep up the good work….