Debarun Borthakur

Climate change is claiming 300,000 lives a year and costing the global economy $125bn annually, with the damage set to escalate rapidly, according to the first study of the immediate effects of global warming.

Pavan Srinivasa and M J Shashank, Class VII students from Vidya Niketan, have won the Best Project Award for their submission in the environmental sciences category, at the recently-concluded National Science Fair 2008.

The Initiative for Research and Innovation in Science (IRIS) conducted the fair at the prestigious Science City premises in Kolkata.

up visions of rusting junkyards on the wrong side of the tracks. But this image may soon get a green makeover. A research project in China suggests that iron shavings from factories can be a cheap and efficient way to clean up polluted water. And because such scrap is widely available, the system could be particularly useful in developing countries.

There is a type of rock with a voracious appetite for carbon dioxide

London: Gadget makers showed off their green credentials at a technology show in London to try to tempt consumers worried about soaring fuel bills, climate change and the financial crisis.
Amid the usual array of power-hungry televisions, stereos and computers, a handful of companies promoted high tech products designed to cut energy consumption.

The annual summer retreat of the sea ice cloaking the Arctic Ocean appears to have ended with the ice not quite matching last year's extraordinary recession, polar scientists said.

Last year, a private company proposed "fertilizing" parts of the ocean with iron, in hopes of encouraging carbon-absorbing blooms of plankton. Meanwhile, researchers elsewhere are talking about injecting chemicals into the atmosphere, launching sun-reflecting mirrors into stationary orbit above the earth or taking other steps to reset the thermostat of a warming planet.

Scientists studying variations in tropical heat and rainfall since the mid-1980s have found a strong link between warm periods and more extreme downpours.

The observed rise in the heaviest rains is about twice that produced by computer simulations used to assess human-caused global warming, said the researchers.

Other studies have already measured a rise in heavy rains in areas as varied as North America and India, and climatologists have long forecast more heavy rains in a world warmed by accumulating greenhouse gases.

The Saharan duststorms help sustain life over large regions of the North Atlantic Ocean, according to a latest study.

Liverpool University researchers found that plants are able to grow in these regions because of their ability to take advantage of iron minerals in Saharan duststorms.

This allows them to use organic or recycled material from dead or decaying plants when nutrients such as phosphorous, which is an essential component of DNA in the ocean are low.