Kolkata-based architect Laurent Fournier tells how ceilings can float and why bamboo-reed-mud make more sense than brick-concrete-steel.

Analysis of the features attributed to grassroots innovation shows them to be common to all innovations whether in rural, industrializing or industrial locations and does not justify splitting innovation into one with the suffix ‘grassroots’ and another without it as done in India’s current innovation policy. Examples and experience from industrialized countries bring out that innovation policies should adopt an integrated approach for all innovations irrespective of the location or process they emerge from.

A fundamental principle of livelihood is that work has a foundational value. It is opposed to the labour-commodity process where the foundational value of work is thoroughly undermined and where work is disembedded from society and taken out of it. In adivasi livelihoods, work is foundational and only through work does a person know what his or her potentialities are. The current adivasi struggles are at bottom attempts to reclaim this foundational value of work and all that it entails.

Despite the bad press that traditional Chinese medicine sometimes receives, proponents believe it represents an untapped
pharmacopeia and are using cutting edge biotechnology to prove it. Gary Humphreys reports.

In an article that forms part of the PLoS Medicine series on Big Food, Carlos Monteiro and Geoffrey Cannon provide a perspective from Brazil on the rise of multinational food companies and the displacement of traditional food systems, and offer suggestions for the public health response.

Ethno medicinal survey was conducted in Satpura region with special reference to Chhindwara district of Madhya Pradesh. This district is a forest district,Chhindwara district, has acquired great importance because of its scenic beauty. Patalkot is a lovely landscape located at a depth of 1200-1500 feet in a valley, inhabited by Gonds, Bharia tribes who are entirely dependent on forest for medication. Information on 15 plant species belong to 15 genera and 14 families which are traditionally used as medicine to cure malaria was collected.

The Guassa area of Menz in the Central Highlands of Ethiopia is an Afro-alpine ecological community with an indigenous resource management system. The local community harvest different resources including collecting grass and firewood from the Guassa area. Cattle and other livestock are also grazed in the Guassa area, especially during the dry season. Several sympatric species of endemic rodents dominate the small mammal ecological communities in the Guassa area, and form most of the diet of the endangered Ethiopian wolf.

The investigation on phytomedicine was conducted in order to asses the traditional uses and exact distribution of medicinal flora of arid areas of Pakistan. It was found that in a total of 59 plant species belonging to 50 genera and 30 families are reported to be used for different diseases as asthma, piles, cancer, skin diseases, as astringent, spermatorrhea, as refrigerant and diabetes. It was investigated that conservation of medicinally important plants and traditional folk knowledge is necessary in order to save them from extinction.