Regional climate models (RCMs) are considered to be more useful than general circulation models for assessing impacts of climate change scenarios in agriculture.

With conventional energy sources being limited in their availability, the search for alternative renewable energy sources is inevitable. Solar energy, an inexhaustible renewable energy is considered a vital source for a developing country like India, where there is a major deficit between the demand and supply of electricity. Crowded urban structures have all the updated electrical appliances, but there is a deficit power supply during peak hour demand.

Globalization and technological revolutions are making the world more interconnected. International trade is one of the major approaches linking the world. Since the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan shocked the global supply chain, more attention has been paid to the global impact of large-scale disasters. China is the second largest trader in the world and faces the most frequent natural disasters.

As the World Health Organization's research arm declares glyphosate a probable carcinogen, Nature looks at the evidence.

Outdoor air pollution is an important risk factor for cardiovascular disease throughout the world, with particulate air pollution alone responsible for over three million deaths each year. Increases in concentrations of daily air pollution are associated with acute myocardial infarction and admission to hospital or death from heart failure. These associations could be mediated through direct and indirect effects of exposure to air pollutants on vascular tone, endothelial function, thrombosis, and myocardial ischaemia.

On May 19, 2014, the 67th World Health Assembly (WHA) adopted WHO’s “Global strategy and targets for tuberculosis prevention, care and control after 2015”. This post-2015 global tuberculosis strategy, labelled the End TB Strategy, was shaped during the past 2 years. A wide range of stakeholders—from ministries of health and national tuberculosis programmes to technical and scientific institutions, financial and development partners, civil society and health activists, non-governmental organisations, and the private sector—contributed to its development.

This paper presents key results from analysis of surface meteorological observations collected in the Northern Arabian/Persian Gulf (N Gulf; Kuwait, Bahrain, and NE Saudi Arabia), which spans a 40-years period (1973–2012). The first part of this study analyzes climate variability in the N Gulf, and relates them to teleconnection patterns (North Atlantic Oscillation, El Nino Southern Oscillation, and Indian Ocean Dipole).

The first full-year budget of the National Democratic Alliance government announced a sharp focus on investment, growth and social security. In addition, Budget 2015-16 claims to have given a boost to cooperative federalism. The budget indeed makes numerous impressive-sounding announcements, but stumbles in the details. This article focuses on the attention-grabbing push for investments and finds that the target of Rs 70,000 crore investment may be over-ambitious.

While the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Act 2001 is a progressive piece of legislation that recognises farmers' rights to seed, it demands payment of an annual maintenance fee by the farmers to protect the varieties which they have been cultivating and conserving for years, only because these varieties have been brought under legal protection through national legislation.

The deaths in Chhattisgarh during a state-sponsored family planning camp held in November 2014 show, yet again, that the lack of checklists and an ad hoc style of functioning can and does result in disaster. This article explains the need for standardisation and protocols in key government processes and talks about the pathetic conditions in which medicines and surgical supplies are procured in public hospitals as well as the failure of state agencies to detect and prohibit sale of substandard drugs.