The screening of humans and people is important to understand and mitigate the risk of a Zika virus epidemic. In their recent study scientists from the indian institute of Science, Bangalore, chalk out the details of how such a program should be carried out.  

The conversion of lush green forests into plantation for the profit of the East India Company still have lasting effects on the Indian wildlife today. Researchers from the Centre for Wildlife Studies, Bangalore, study the conflict between leopards and humans due to this altered landscape. They find that from tea plantations to protected areas, leopard inflict non fatal attacks on humans, which are most likely the big cats attempt to defend itself.

The Ministry of Earth Sciences is set to extend the Monsoon Mission from the predicting the rains of the monsoon to disaster management. The facility will improve monsoon forecasts over the short and extended range. The programme is aimed to help the farming sector manage thier agricultural operations and water reservoirs.

Climate change is here and governments around the world are trying their best to stem its debilitating impacts. REDD+ (Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation), a programme to encourage the sustainable management of existing forests that take in large amounts of greenhouse gases, is a step in this direction. However, there are technical difficulties in measuring the effectiveness of REDD+.

The push for renewable energy has been greater than ever in the recent past, thanks to the realisation of the fact that fossil fuels and other forms of energy wreak havoc on the environment. India, like many other countries, has ambitious goals for producing electricity using renewable sources for 2022. In our rush to chase this goal, how are our policies crafted? Are they a win-win situation for the producers and the customers? Or are they making renewable energy all the more expensive, thus defeating the purpose of the switch? A new study now examines how renewable energy policies are structured and recommends some changes to make them effective and help us reach our 2022 goals.

What can a large company learn from a marriage? In this new study researchers show that different social systems, be it a marriage between two individuals or a firm with thousands of employees, show similarities in the way they fail. When the reasons for failure are plotted on a graph, the curves obtained for the different social systems turned out to show similar distribution. For example,willingness of the individuals that make a system, to make sacrifices for the greater good of the system was found to be a key factor in keeping social systems alive.  

The warming climate has made the world panic. Although some countries are still skeptical, most scientists agree about the inevitable rise in the temperature of the planet by the year 2030. Several countries have already started a shift towards renewable sources, like solar and with the Paris agreement, the world joined this movement.

Commons is defined as any natural or cultural resources that can be accessed by any member of a society. This includes the air we breathe, oceans and rivers, grazing lands, fish stock, forests and even an office computer. ‘Tragedy of the Commons’, a concept which emerged in 1833 and was later revived in 1968 by Garett Hardin in an article of the same name, explores the struggle for such commons. The tragedy occurs when individuals in a society, guided by their own self-interest, would act against the common good and deplete the common shared resource.

The process of voting is the cornerstone of any democratic process. Be it selecting the leader of a nation or just deciding the laws that govern a nation, a democratic process allows the different participants and stakeholders of the election to have a uniform chance of having their choice win. The process of voting, sometime called the electoral system, can itself be carried out in many ways, sometimes depending on the outcome. A Plurality voting system selects the candidate with the highest number of votes as the winner.

Invasive plants pose a major threat to the native vegetation of an ecosystem, resulting in severe competition for resources and in some cases, complete replacement of native plants by alien plants. Lantana camara is a well-known alien plant in India that has spread like wildfire and needs better strategies to manage this invasion. Since seed dispersal plays a major role in the spread of this shrub, a new study now attempts to understand how this plant succeeds in attracting various fruit eating birds that act as seed dispersers. By understanding how Lantana attracts these birds, better strategies to manage the weed could be developed, say the researchers.