The global threat that insecticides pose for aquatic biodiversity has been revealed in a recent modelling study that pinpoints areas at greatest risk. The mapping exercise conducted by the researchers reveals that aquatic life in water bodies within 40 per cent of the global land surface is at risk from insecticides running off the land.
Tag: scidev
Paulo Rebêlo Scidev.net | 25.jul.2014 link Twelve universities and research institutions from around the world have joined forces to assess the critical issues facing the world’s tropical regions and to examine how investments in aid, research and education affect development there. The institutions say they “share a responsibility to work with and for the people of the tropics, to bring to bear the power of our understanding, science and innovation on the issues of the tropics to create a brighter future for the tropics and its peoples”. Participating universities include Ecuador’s university Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral, the University of Nairobi in Kenya, and the University of Papua New Guinea. The group says it will produce a major report every five years, and a paper focusing on a key tropical issue every year. They released their first State of the Tropics report in Myanmar last month (29 June) to address a broad question: is life in the tropics getting better? “The report demonstrates that nations in the tropics have made extraordinary progress across a wide range of environmental, social and economic indicators in recent decades,” says Sandra Harding, vice chancellor of James Cook University in Australia and convenor of the
[RECIFE] Brazil may develop its own system of digital television technology rather than importing such a system from abroad (as several of its Latin American neighbours have already done), if a proposal by the country’s minister of communications, Miro Teixeira, is accepted. Digital television has not yet been introduced into Brazil, the country with the world’s sixth largest television audience — even though foreign companies have been lobbying the Brazilian government for several years to adopt digital systems used abroad, such as those used in Europe, the United States and Japan. But Teixeira has proposed to the Brazilian president, Luis Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva that Brazil should develop and adopt its own technology, arguing that this would allow the country to adapt the technology to its social and economic needs. In an official briefing to the president, Teixeira suggested that Brazil should manufacture its own televisions and related equipment, such as adapters and receivers, in order to boost its semiconductor industry and to generate royalties for national institutions. The government has already created a consortium bringing together 10 research centres and a private company that will jointly conduct research on digital television technology. But so far there is no fixed