L y aura un quiz sur le vocabulaire

“The issue is the huge reduction in funding for research and development in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union,” says Mr Adams. “Although there has been an exodus of many of the rising stars of Russian research, there is still a great pool of talent there. It is not in the interests of the rest of the world for the exodus to continue, and we need more co-funding arrangements to help Russian research get back up to speed.”

By Clive Cookson Financial Times March 29, 2013 6:21 pm

The Panama Canal watershed, where scientists are measuring the economic benefits of nature conservation

Under the wide green umbrella of the Panamanian rainforest, the only signs of human intrusion are yellow, orange and blue marks painted around some of the tree trunks. Those marks help measure the plants’ water efficiency, as trees are believed to steady the flow of rivers.

“We are trying to understand the services provided by forests,” says Jefferson Hall, a Yale-educated forest ecologist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

For the past five years Hall has been working on the Panama Canal watershed, on forest regeneration and measuring the effects of different land uses on water flows, as well as carbon sequestration and biodiversity. At the same time he is assessing the potential economic return from investment in environmental protection.

His research, in one of the most bio-diverse countries in a region at the forefront of carbon negotiations, is part of a growing effort to give the environment a realistic financial value.

According to recent findings by the Inter-American Development Bank or IDB, Latin America and the Caribbean are home to half of the earth’s tropical forests. The region hosts 40 per cent of global biodiversity, which in turn supports 15 per cent of its GDP and 50 per cent of its exports.

In a novel initiative, the IDB believes this “wild wealth” could be turned into a spur for growth and innovation by including the value of biodiversity in key economic sectors.

The wealth of biodiversity generates some critical benefits, such as food, shelter, clean water and air, flood and drought mitigation, disease and pest control. These “ecosystem services” directly support important economic sectors – mostly agriculture, fisheries, forestry and tourism – which together employ 17 per cent of the region’s labour force.

The list of current “services” is long. To name a few, eco-tourism generates $60bn annually in the region; coral reefs in the Caribbean protect the shores and allow the generation of $15bn in revenues; the global economic value of bee pollination is estimated at $200bn.

“Investing in nature is one of the smartest investments you can make,” says Mark Tercek, a former Goldman Sachs banker currently heading The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest conservation organisation with more than $5bn in assets.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Boldly gone

Thirty-five years after launch, and 11 billion miles from the sun, Nasa’s Voyager 1 probe has become the first man-made object to leave the solar system, according to a study in Geophysical Research Letters.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The author of Nature’s Fortune, to be published next month, Tercek is a champion of the idea of “natural capital” – putting an asset value on nature. His controversial approach is to work alongside some of the world’s biggest polluters to jointly preserve the environment, because “business objectives and those of environmentalists can overlap”.

This is starting to happen with biotechnology research. Marcelo Cardoso, vice-president of Natura, a cosmetics producer in Brazil, says: “Brazilian biodiversity will become our Silicon Valley.” Pursuing that idea, the Brazilian government is starting to finance laboratories to study biotech applications in various different biomes.

“Once biodiversity services are … incorporated in the value chain it will be natural for companies to invest in preservation of those services,” says Alexandre Meira da Rosa, who heads IDB’s infrastructure and environment division.

Some larger companies such as Femsa, the Mexico-based beverage group, are already investing in water projects in two of the world’s most biodiverse countries, Ecuador and Colombia, while HSBC funded part of Hall’s rainforest research in Panama.

Back in the green, misty hills along the eastern watershed of the Panama Canal, Hall keeps testing trees for their ability to act as “sponges”, hoping that his work can be replicated elsewhere.

“Agriculture needs clean water, cities need clean water, Coca-Cola needs clean water, a brewery needs clean water,” he says. “And that, certainly, has economic value.”

– Andres Schipani

-------------------------------------------

Not all roads lead to ruin

©William Laurence

Building roads to save the planet

Environmentalists generally react with horror to road-building – and often their fears are well founded. The estimated 100,000km of road criss-crossing the Amazon basin have caused catastrophic damage.

But in a paper in the journal Nature two professors of conservation science, Andrew Balmford at Cambridge university and William Laurance of James Cook University in Australia, put in a plea for more roads – as long as they are in the right place.

“Roads are like real estate,” says Laurance. “It’s ‘location, location, location’. In the right places roads can actually help protect nature.”

That means careful planning, keeping roads out of wilderness areas and concentrating them in places best suited for farming and development.

“In such areas roads can improve farming, making it much easier to move crops to market and import fertiliser,” says Balmford. “This can increase farm profits, improve the livelihoods of rural residents, enhance food security and draw migrants away from vulnerable wilderness areas.”

The pair call for a global mapping programme to advise governments and conservation organisations on where to put roads, where to avoid them and even where to shut down existing roads.

“By working together,” says Laurance, “development experts, agriculturalists and ecologists could provide badly needed guidelines on where to build good roads rather than bad roads.”

-------------------------------------------

Ecologists have long known that the human colonisation of remote Pacific islands over the past 3,500 years led to a catastrophic extinction of large flightless birds, but estimates of the number of species lost have varied widely.

An international study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences attempts to pin down the toll by using statistical modelling to fill in the large gaps in the fossil record. Most extinct species remain undiscovered because fossil hunting across several hundred Pacific islands has been patchy and incomplete.

The researchers, led by Richard Duncan at the University of Canberra, conclude that human settlement of Pacific islands wiped out about 1,000 species of “nonpasserine landbirds” – birds other than songbirds and seabirds – many of which had become flightless because land predators were absent. That compares with a current global total of about 10,000 avian species of all types.

The scientists started from 41 islands where there is good evidence of extinction from fossil and other sources; two-thirds of the bird populations here became extinct between human arrival and first European contact. Reasons for extinction include hunting, habitat loss and the introduction of vermin.

Extrapolating these results to all 269 Pacific islands that were large and isolated enough to have supported at least one “endemic” species (a bird that lives nowhere else) brings the total close to 1,000 extinctions, ranging from flightless waterfowl to pigeons.

Lydia Wetsi is one of three young women trained as pilots and community health professionals

Rosie Collyer Report: Ghana - 

Article published Wednesday 02 May 2012 - Latest update : Wednesday 02 May 2012 Radio France Internationale RFI

The women have begun delivering health-related materials to isolated communities around Lake Volta. They drop specially designed aerodynamic packages containing information on how to prevent schistosomiasis, which is classified by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as a neglected tropical disease.

“The disease is particularly prevalent around the lake due to poor sanitation,” Lester Chihitsulo, a WHO expert, told RFI. “The communities that are worst affected lack access to potable water and hygiene education.”

Humans become infected with schistosomiasis through contact with snails that live in stagnant water. Symptoms include fever and passing blood in the urine and faeces.

Children are particularly at risk because of their play habits. Infected children suffer from stunted cognitive growth due to the parasite eating away at their internal organs.

Although the WHO strategy for combating the disease is increased access to the drug praziquantel, Chihitsulo says, “We also encourage organisations to collaborate with the ministry of health in a given country to assist in delivering hygiene education.”

Many of the villages around Lake Volta are several hours from a tarmac road and others are completely cut off during the rainy season. So the easiest way for communities to be reached is by air.

The trainees are not only being taught to build, maintain and fly light aircraft, the four-year training course also includes modules in community health care. While schistosomiasis prevention is the organisation’s main focus, it also hopes that, once the women graduate, they will be able to fly to villages and give basic healthcare.

“We are convinced that by training women, as opposed to men, they will be compelled to serve their communities,” Jonathan Porter, Medicine On The Move's founder told RFI. “Men tend to leave rural areas and go to the city or abroad when they obtain these kinds of skills.”

Earlier this month Patricia Malwali - who is one of only a handful of Ghanaian women to hold her pilot’s license - with the assistance of a co-pilot dropped information on how to prevent schistosomiasis to more than thirty villages. “The packages are dropped above school playgrounds to ensure they are picked up by teachers who can read,” Malwali explains.

For now Medicine On The Move’s contribution to the eradication of schistosomiasis in Ghana may only represent a drop in the ocean.

Access to medication in the form of praziquantel has a much bigger impact with more than 33.5 million people being treated with the drug in 2010 as opposed to 12.4 million in 2006.

But praziquantel doesn’t prevent reinfection, which is why education remains a key component in the complete eradication of the disease. tags: Airplane - Disease - Ghana - Health - Report

Born in 1706, Emilie had three pieces of great good fortune in her life. The first was to be born with a remarkable brain. Her greatest work was to translate the “Principia”, the path-breaking work on physics by the secretive Cambridge brainbox, Isaac Newton, who died when Emilie was 20. She did not just translate his writing from Latin to French; she also expressed Newton's obscure geometric proofs using the more accessible language of calculus. And she teased out of his convoluted web of theorems the crucial implications for the study of gravity and energy. That laid the foundation for the next century's discoveries in theoretical physics. The use of the square of the speed of light, c², in Einstein's most famous equation, E=mc² is directly traceable to her work. Emilie's second piece of luck was that her father allowed her to use her brain: not much, admittedly, but certainly far more than most bright girls of her time and country. She was not sent to a convent. He was wealthy and liberal-minded enough to buy her books and talk to her about astronomy. He married her to Florent-Claude, Marquis du Châtelet-Lomont, who was a touch dull but decent—and unbothered by his brainy wife's intellectual and amorous adventures. Indeed, he liked and admired Voltaire.

Her third great good fortune was her array of mind-expanding, appreciative lovers. They may have been unsatisfactory mates by today's standards, but they were rarities in an age when few men looked for intellectual companionship from women. Emilie started by bedding the Duc de Richelieu, the “most sought-after man in France”. He bolstered her intellectual confidence, dented by an isolated childhood and early marriage. Even when she dumped him, they remained friends. Then came Voltaire, needy, self-indulgent, unreliable and self-centred—but still the love of her life and its great intellectual and cultural stimulus. Even when passion cooled, they remained great companions. Finally, she fell in love with Jean-François, Marquis de Saint-Lambert, a much younger poet. He filled the emotional and physical gap left by Voltaire. But he also proved careless in what passed for contraception in those days. That led to pregnancy and the infection that killed Emilie when she was only 42. It is tempting to speculate what heights of discovery Emilie might have achieved in a healthier and more open-minded age. But that would be to miss the point. The remarkable thing is that she managed so much, and with such good humour and reflective self-knowledge. It is her biographer's good fortune that there is a great deal of accessible material about her life. Voltaire was spied on energetically; a thicket of secret police reports remains. So too do many of her letters, both sent and received.

The book may strike some readers as slightly lubricious in its attention to Emilie's sexual habits and predilections. A more serious shortcoming, explicable only by authorial laziness (unlikely) or publisher's stinginess (all too probable) is the startling and inconvenient lack of an index. That is just the sort of slap-happy approach to which Voltaire was prone, and which so pained Emilie.

Your account has been frozen. For your available options click the below button.

To read this article in full you must have registered and have a Premium Content Subscription with the The Scotsman site.

To read this article in full you must be registered with the site.