Millions of Indians are suspected to be carriers of the drug-resistant bug After the scary New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase-1 or the “superbug” was detected two years ago, the world is now faced with the community-acquired methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (ca-MRSA) bacterium that is resistant to almost all common antibiotics. In India, where poor hygiene and the availability of over-the-counter antibiotics lead to development of resistance, an estimated 100 to 200 million people are reportedly...

-The New York Times   It started five years ago after a young engineer in San Francisco sketched out a quirky little Web tool for telling your friends what you were up to. It became a bullhorn for millions of people worldwide, especially vital in nations that tend to muzzle their own people. But this week, in a sort of coming-of-age moment, Twitter announced that upon request, it would block certain messages...

Twitter, a hugely popular social networking site for microblogging, has said that "if required by the law" it can block tweets in a particular country. In a post titled 'Tweets Must Still Flow', Twitter, which has around 300 million users, wrote on its official blog, "Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country, while keeping it available in the rest of...

It is official: India has the world's most toxic air. In a new study by Yale and Columbia Universities, India holds the very last rank among 132 nations in terms of air quality with regard to its effect on human health. India scored a minuscule 3.73 out of a possible 100 points in the analysis, lagging far behind the next worst performer, Bangladesh, which scored 13.66. In fact, the entire South Asian...

Madhya Pradesh accounts for nearly 40 per cent of the total area under certified organic farming in the country. Though most of it is due to cotton fields, the state has an immense potential to bring even food crops under organic cultivation.   What may help the state’s cause is that agriculture is already organic by default in many tribal-dominated districts because farmers either don't have the resources to use chemical fertilizers...