Not far from the Cauvery river, in Tamil Nadu’s Tiruchirapalli district, is a public toilet run by the local government. Located at Saliyar Marg, alongside an irrigation canal that brings Cauvery water to farms downstream, the structure with 14 enclosures – seven each for men and women – has been built by the Nagar Panchayat of Musiri. The local government looks after its maintenance and upkeep.

Columbus: The same hotspot in Earth’s mantle that feeds Iceland’s active volcanoes has been playing a trick on the scientists who are trying to measure how much ice is melting on nearby Greenland.

One-sixth of Indian plants have medicinal attributes but the threat of extinction looms large. The anti-fatigue property of Trichopus zeylanicus traditionally used by Kani tribes of Western Ghats in Kerala is an accepted fact discovered per chance by Council of Scientific and Industrial Research team during a forest expedition. 

Prague: Earth requires fuel to drive plate tectonics, volcanoes and its magnetic field. Like a hybrid car, Earth taps two sources of energy to run its engine: primordial energy from assembling the planet and nuclear energy from the heat produced during natural radioactive decay. Scientists have developed numerous models to predict how much fuel remains inside Earth to drive its engines -- and estimates vary widely -- but the true amount remains unknown.

Washington: A University of Oklahoma study demonstrates for the first time that remote sensing data from weather surveillance radar and on-the-ground data from the eBird citizen science database both yield robust indices of migration timing, also known as migration phenology. These indices can now be used to address the critical gap in our knowledge regarding the cues that migrants use for fine tuning their migration timing in response to climate.

Washington: A new study provides insight into how the current El Niño, one of the strongest on record, formed in the Pacific Ocean.