Sunderbans will drown in 60 yrs: WWF

The World Wildlife Fund(WWF) has warned that days are numbered for much of the sensitive Sunderbans eco-system and in 60 years vast tracts of the rare mangrove forests, home to the Bengal tiger, will be inundated by the rising sea.

The study, focussed on Sunderbans in Bangladesh, says the sea was rising more swiftly than anticipated by
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 and would rise 11.2 inches (above 2000 levels) by 2070. This would result in shrinkage of the Bangladesh Sunderbans by 96% within half a century, reducing the tiger population there to less than 20, said the study.

Unlike previous efforts, WWF’s deputy director of conservation science Colby Loucks and his colleagues used a high-resolution digital elevation model with eight estimates of sea level rise to predict the impact on tiger habitat and population size. The team was able to come up with the most accurate predictions till date by importing over 80,000 Global Positioning System (GPS) elevation points.

The study, Sea Level Rise and Tigers: Predicted Impacts to Bangladesh’s Sunderbans Mangroves, has been published in the journal, Climatic Change. Though the Indian part of the Sunderbans will not be so badly affected, conservationists wonder how many tigers would be able to survive here with nearly 60% of the habitat gone. Of the total Sunderbans, nearly 60% is in Bangladesh. Tigers do not recognize international borders though and cross over from one side to the other as and when they choose.

Experts say that every tiger requires a large territory of its own (known as range). An ever-spreading human habitat in the Indian part has already resulted in a drop in the big cats’ territory, leading to frequent incidents of straying.

Tigers have adapted to a life in the mangroves and crabs constitute an important part of their diet. Though tigers are a highly adaptable species, occupying territory from the snowy forests of Russia to the tropics of Indonesia, the projected sea level rise in the Sunderbans may outpace the animal’s ability to adapt,” a WWF source said. There are no accurate estimates, but conservationists estimate the mangroves could be home to upto 400 big cats.

The sea level rise will also have an impact on the lives of people who depend on the Sunderbans for their livelihood. The mangroves protect human habitation from cyclones and other natural disasters.

WWF has recommended that governments and natural resource managers take immediate steps to conserve and expand mangroves while preventing poaching and retaliatory killing of tigers. Neighbouring countries should increase sediment delivery and freshwater flows to the coastal region to support agriculture and replenishment of the land.

Are you being harassed at workplace?

79 per cent of women face sexual harassment at workplace.

A study has revealed that 79 per cent of women face sexual harassment at workplace and those in casual and contract jobs are more at risk.

Anthony LaMontagne, associate professor at the VicHealth Centre for the Promotion of Mental Health and Community Wellbeing, examined the likelihood of sexual harassment in different types of employment.

“Our study shows that 79 per cent of those who experience unwanted sexual advances at work are women,” LaMontagne said. “The study is an important new evidence because precarious employment has been associated with a variety of adverse working conditions as well as with poorer mental and physical health,” he added.

“People who are employed in casual jobs are about five times more likely to be subjected to unwanted sexual advances. The research also shows that people in contract positions are about 10 times more likely to be sexually harassed at work,” LaMontagne added.

Victorian Health Promotion Foundation CEO Todd Harper observed: “Not only are women more likely to experience sexual harassment but females make up bigger proportions of industries which use more casual and contract labour.”

“There is a strong link between sexual harassment and mental health problems. This behaviour is costly and preventable,” Harper said in a release.

How to Stop Sexual Harassment at Work

Instructions

Step1

Verbally warn. If you so choose, and depending on the severity of the sexual harassment, you can verbally warn the person that if they falter again you will report them. Many times this will stop it dead in the tracks, but sometimes it will not.

Step2

Report the incident. No matter what, you must report any incident of sexual harassment. Simply write down a brief synopsis of what happened, and make sure to submit it to your boss and the proper other channels at your workplace.

Step3

Find the help you need. There are tons of resources you can find on the internet that have places that will help you. You do need to take the first step and research and contact these organizations in order to get the help you need.

Step4

Take action. Do not let yourself sit idle. Sexual harassment is illegal, and there are plenty of things that you can do to stop it. Make sure your boss and co-workers realize how serious you are about defending your rights.

Tips & Warnings

• Remember, sexual harassment is illegal; there is no room for it in the workplace ever.
• Never falsely report a sexual harassment incident.

 

“Magic” lamp to transform rural homes in INDIA

A couple using a solar lamp in their hutment.

A multi-purpose, light-weight solar-powered lamp will be launched soon to meet the rural energy requirements for lighting.

“Egg Lamp”, as it is called by its Bangalore-based maker Kotak Urja Pvt Ltd, also has new generation features – it can also be used for charging mobile phones and has a provision for FM radio with built-in antenna and speakers.

The product has already come in for praise before its formal launch, expected in first half of this month, winning the award for best electronics product in the energy (honourable mention) category at the India Semiconductor Association’s annual conference last month.

The product, which is rechargeable by solar energy in six hours of sunshine besides by main AC, is being positioned as a replacement for kerosene lamp, and also emergency lamp in urban areas to compete with the likes of Panasonic and BPL.

Egg lamp, which can be wall-mounted, ceiling-mounted, hung on hook or carried by shoulder strap, is expected to be priced below Rs 1,500, Kotak Urja’s CEO K Srinivas Kumar told PTI.

The product operates on LED or CFL mode, works for six to 16 hours depending on usage pattern and has “dimmer mode switch” for operating for reading light, “habitation” (family atmosphere light) and night light.

Mr. Kumar said it has a mobile charging socket suitable for top brands of mobile phones. Just like the mobile phones, this product also shows the health of batteries (indicates its usage status).

“It’s portable and light-weight and has NiMH batteries for multiple recharge and weighs 2.2 kgs only,” he said. “For urban homes, it is positioned as emergency lamp. Brightness is as good as that of a 25 W bulb”. These rechargeable batteries last for 4-5 years.

The company is now looking out for a huge network of NGOs and entrepreneurs to take the IP-based product to the masses.

It hopes to sell 25,000 to 30,000 units in the first year, going up to a cumulative figure of ten lakh within two-and-half-years.

Mr. Kumar said the product also has export potential in countries with similar profile as that of India, in Africa and South East Asia, and in fact the company is scouting for partners. In Europe and the US, it can be positioned as a “camping” and “recreation” light, he said.

Mr. Kumar also talked about the product’s health and social benefits. Egg lamp is safe and clean, unlike kerosene lamps whose toxic fumes cause respiratory infections.

In power-starved rural homes, this product enables family members to gather together, with the help of “surrounding” light (habitation) of Egg lamp, he said.

The product also helps small shop owners and vegetable vendors to extend their business hours, and improves “government finances” as kerosene is subsidised to an extent of Rs 20,000 crore annually.

1.8 lakh Olive Ridleys turtles arrive on Orissa beach for nesting

KENDRAPARA (Orissa, INDIA): An estimated 1.8 lakh female Olive Ridley turtles have so far arrived en-masse to lay eggs, a unique natural phenomenon, at Gahirmatha marine sanctuary in Kendrapara district, officials said.

Since February 24 night the tranquil beaches on south eastern part of Nasi-2 island, close to Defence Research Development Organisation’s installation at the Wheeler’s Island, are teeming with turtles, Prasanna Kumar Behera, Divisional Forest Officer, Rajnagar Mangrove (Wildlife) forest division, said.

“The Olive Ridleys are literally invading the beach and are digging 2-3 feet deep pits to lay eggs. They covered the pits with sand after laying the eggs and loitered in the area for an hour or two before disappearing into the waves,” he said.

“With thousands of the turtles digging the pits at the same time, it created a soothing cacophony”, a forest official present at the site, said.

Net beats newspapers as news source: U.S. Study

Sixty-one percent Americans got at least some of their news online, compared to 54 percent who listened to radio news and 50 per cent who read newspapers. (project smile india)

More Americans get their news from the internet than from either newspapers or radio. But television is still the most popular news source, according to a study released Monday.

The survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 61 percent of Americans got at least some of their news online, compared to 54 percent who listened to radio news and 50 percent who read newspapers. Some 78 percent of respondents said they watched television news.

Most respondents mix and match for their news — with 92 percent saying they get their news from more than one source — combining social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook with radio, TV and newspapers, the report found.

Online users were younger than other news consumers. Some 37 per said they have contributed to the “creation” of news, commented on it online and shared or posted news on sites like Facebook and Twitter, according to the study.

Twenty-eight percent of online users customize their home pages to include news “from sources and on topics that particularly interest them,” the report found.

With 37 percent of cellphone owners using their mobile devices to get news, the report said that news was becoming “portable, personalized and participatory.” Online users tended to “forage widely” but regularly visited only a “handful of different sites,” the report’s authors said. Portals and news aggregators such as Google News, Yahoo News and AOL were popular, as were the sites of traditional news organizations such as the BBC, New York Times and CNN, the report said.

 

Why we fight with each other in the name of religion when there’s no religion teach us to fight………..?

Answerer 1
Islam does teach one to fight, and the Christian bible is at best ambiguous about fighting for religion. Incidentally, these two religions have been responsible for the vast majority of religious violence.
Answerer 2
I’m not fighting; people who choose to fight aren’t REAL Christians.
Answerer 3
Because we are not religious!
Answerer 4
Hmmm , cause bigots don’t actually believe in anything but forcing their own beliefs on others to share the happiness and greatness of their religion with others even through wars.
Plus , Islam teaches how to defend yourself even if it is through war . Practical , eh ?

PLEASE SEND YOUR COMMENTS ON THE SAME….

Quote of the Day

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”

~ ALBERT CAMUS (French author,philosopher & journalist 1913 – 1960)

 

Global warming likely to impact rainfall patterns

Climate models project that the global average temperature will rise about 1 degree C by mid-century, if we continue with business as usual and emit greenhouse gases.

The global average, though, does not tell us anything about what will happen to regional climates.

Analysing global model warming projections in models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a team headed by meteorologist Shang-Ping Xie at the University of Hawaii finds that ocean temperature patterns in the tropics and sub-tropics will change in ways that will significantly alter rainfall patterns.

Scientists have mostly assumed that the surfaces of oceans will warm rather evenly in the tropics. This assumption has led to “wetter-gets-wetter” and “drier-gets-drier” regional rainfall projections.

Xie’s team has gathered evidence that, although ocean surface temperatures can be expected to increase mostly everywhere by mid-century, the increase may differ by up to 1.5degreesC depending upon the region.

“Compared to the mean projected rise of 1degreesC, such differences are fairly large and can have a pronounced impact on tropical and subtropical climate by altering atmospheric heating patterns and therefore rainfall,” explains Xie.

“Our results broadly indicate that regions of peak sea surface temperature will get wetter, and those relatively cool will get drier,” adds Xie, according to the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

The study is slated for publication in the Journal of Climate this month.

26 per cent of Americans get news via phone: survey

What An Idea Sir Ji 

Just over a quarter of American adults now read news on their cell phones, according to a new report.

The survey results offer another sign of how people are changing they way they get information. Technology has been reshaping the news business and the way consumers relate to it for more than a decade. The latest shift is being driven by the exploding popularity of phones that can easily access the Internet.

The new study found that 26 per cent of Americans get news on their phones. Pew doesn’t have comparable data for say, two or three years ago. But evidence of the shift in habits can be seen in this finding: Younger cell phone owners are more likely to look for news on their phones. About 43 per cent of those under 50 said they are mobile news consumers, compared with 15 per cent of older respondents.

Still, some things don’t change. Readers’ No. 1 concern when they look for news on their phones: the weather. Of the 37 per cent of cell phone owners who said they use the Internet on their phone, 72 per cent said they check weather reports. Current events came in second with 68 percent.

Pew’s survey offered a wide range of statistics on people’s news habits. It showed people are not relying on one medium. Just shy of 60 per cent of respondents get news from both online and offline sources. And 46 per cent said they use four to six different types of media on a typical day.

The Web is also helping to turn the news into more of a social experience: More than 80 percent of respondents get or receive news via e-mailed links.

The results were based on telephone interviews with 2,259 people over the age of 18, conducted between Dec. 28 and Jan. 19. For questions to that entire group, the margin of error was 2.3 percentage points. On questions to just Internet users, the margin was 2.7 percentage points.

 

Can I be green and surf the net?

Every time you go online you increase your carbon footprint. 

Is it possible to be a green surfer?

• 
• 
  
  
  • Lucy Siegle
  • The Observer, Sunday 28 February 2010

Somewhere in California (and soon to be in India and possibly Iceland) there are vast tracts of hulking warehouses containing thousands of energy-guzzling web servers – it’s farming, but not as depicted in The Archers.

Server farms provide the network to transmit websites. They are powered by electricity, predominantly from coal-fired power stations. Add in the energy required to make your PC in the first place and computing is responsible for 1bn tonnes of CO₂ each year – more emissions than aviation. In pollution terms, using t’internet could be your equivalent of an Arkwright mill at full throttle during the Industrial Revolution.

Last month some headlines suggested that a Google search generated 7g of CO₂ – the same as making a cup of tea. This left the eco-minded home worker in a real quandary: I chose the cup of tea. Later Google corrected this to 0.2g per search. But still, it all adds up.

The latest research suggests that you create 20mg of CO₂ per second per visit to a website. The more whistles and bells on the site the higher this gets – up to 300mg of CO₂ per second for one with video content. Running an avatar in Second Life uses more electricity than a live person in Brazil. Ask yourself: is this watt necessary?

Employ a spam filter, too. In 2008 an estimated 62 trillion spam emails were sent globally, creating the same greenhouse gas emissions as 3.1m passenger cars.

I know what you’re thinking: what’s wrong with a reference book? Well, US academics remind us that driving a mile and back to the library produces 100 times more greenhouse gas emissions than a web search. Remaining ignorant is carbon free.