Everyday happenings in Science

Since the emergence of this pandemic, a heated debate on social, television and print media is taking place whether increase in temperature will kill this virus or not? Few say, it is a hoax and high temperature has no affect on its mortality while others debated, temperature will influence its spread. I even read long blog posts consisting of arguments how temperature will melt the lipid content of Coronavirus and the virus will be destroyed. But being a scientist, I am only supposed to believe on data either generated in laboratory or via careful statistical analysis. Numerous recent studies have attempted to find correlation between high temperature and humidity and the rate of COVID-19 spread. Most conducted studies have applied statistical tools to find linear relationship between the reported case of COVID-19 and elevated temperature. Fortunately, almost all have reported that with increased temperature and humidity the spread of SARS-CoV-2 is slowed down. However, this a...

Every change requires strong will and guided conscience. It is an unfortunate human nature that we are flabbergasted by things which happen to affect us directly such as the ongoing Corona pandemic that is piling up the bodies all around the world. Alas! We fail to realize that there are certain phenomena which may not have direct consequences on human health in short term and therefore they are usually overlooked but they have more severe and deleterious upshots on our existence. Rampant pollution propagation and climate change are such indirect and far more gruesome issues. What we require is to understand that the physical environment around us does not only contain aesthetic value, rather it also preserves the quality of air we breathe in, the water we drink and the land we inhabit, along with the diverse existence of flora and fauna on which our survival as well as our luxuries depend on. Curbing pollution and climate change vulnerabilities are now topping the list of internati...

Global warming is the preliminary impact exerted by climate change, with all others being reverberations of increased average temperature. Peoples of the world have been facing stark climatic conditions since the industrial revolution of mid 1700s. The rampant increase in earth's average annual temperature, from 0.85 degree Celsius in 1880 to about 1 degree Celsius in 2020 (IPCC-SR), intervenes in various social and natural processes by altering snow covers, sea levels and weather patterns at local, regional and planetary level. The adverse impacts of climate change have been making the global communities vulnerable to inundation of low-lying lands and extreme weather events such as cyclones, floods and droughts of higher magnitudes than recorded ever before in annals of history. Consequently, the survival in terms of food and health security of vulnerable communities is in a dire strait. This vulnerability, however, is not uniform: in fact low and middle income countries are mor...