-The Telegraph New Delhi: Biochemist Thuppil Venkatesh says he is not surprised by claims of food safety regulators in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi that they have detected lead, a potential toxin to humans, in Maggi noodles. For over a decade, Venkatesh, professor emeritus at St John's Medical College, Bangalore, has been trying to warn the country about what he says are dangerous levels of lead in the environment that may slip into...

-Hindustan Times Scientists at IIT Roorkee have come up with a new construction technique for earthquake resistant housing using recycled pieces of rubber tyres and the scheme is based on the principle of dissipating energy. Pankaj Agarwal of the department of earthquake engineering, IIT Roorkee told HT: “This is based on interlocking of pre-cast slotted concrete blocks with the help of energy dissipation links. These links are prepared by recycling pieces of...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: As the death toll in the current heat wave crossed the 2,000 mark, this has become the fifth deadliest ever heatwave in the world and the second deadliest in India, according to an international database of disasters. Weathermen are predicting that there are a few more days left in the ongoing heatwave which has killed the most number of people in Andhra Pradesh and Telengana, while...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Union agriculture ministry is probing the circumstances under which a senior government scientist purportedly tried to malign vaccines used to protect livestock from foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks that can threaten India's milk yields. An expert panel from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research has told the agriculture ministry that Bhoj Raj Singh, a microbiologist at an ICAR research centre, has "caused damage" to the reputation of India's foot-and-mouth...

-Hindustan Times Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh is staring at a drought worse than last year’s, officials said on Thursday, raising worries of a severe impact on the kharif crop crucial to feeding millions of people in the country’s most populous state.   The state government has put 70 out of the 75 districts on high alert and also prepared a contingency plan after the India Meteorological Department’s (IMD) forecast a below normal monsoon this...