In short

golden danger: The fragile eco-system of Lake Bosumtwi, Ghana's largest natural lake, is in danger. Ghana's mineral commission has reportedly permitted a Canadian exploration and development company, Norcan Resources Limited, to explore the area around the lake for gold deposits. The company now needs only the clearance of Ghana's environmental protection agency to go ahead with its work. Lake Bosumtwi supports many threatened bird species and unique plant and fish varieties. Local communities depend on it for their livelihood.

Poison in Indian food

Reports of high mercury content in us waters have alarmed American Indians in Minnesota, among the biggest fish consumers. According to a recent report based on us Environmental Protection Agency data, 44 states, including Minnesota, have high levels of mercury in their waters. Earlier this year, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency also said that around 1,900 lakes and streams in the state were "impaired".

Who will save the fish?

three truckloads of dead fish were found in the famous Sursagar Lake, in Vadodara, Gujarat, during a cleaning operation from September 18 to October 10, 2004. On October 11, 2004, about two truckloads of dead fish were removed from Ahmedabad's Kankaria Lake. These incidents once again brought to light the gross neglect of urban lakes in India, typically due to official insensitivity.

Too close for comfort

A spill of toxic heavy metals into a river in northern Romania, some 60 miles from the border with Ukraine, has caused the latter to cut water supplies to five of its towns in the Transcarpathian region. According to an official from the regional environment authority, "A faulty hydro-transport pipeline at the Baia Borsa gold mine in Romania had broken and started to spread sludge containing zinc, lead and copper into the Cisla river". Cisla, a tributary of the Viseu river, joins the Tisa, which in turn flows first into Ukraine and then Hungary.

Bytes

no fishy treatment: A human blood clotting agent required for treating haemophilia and serious bleeding has been produced using genetically modified fish by researchers from the University of Southampton, the UK. There is still a long way to go before the product reaches the market, but if the project is a commercial success, many other proteins might be made this way.

Bytes

how planets form: Elongated dust clouds, rather than fluffy blobs of dust, are the seeds of planet formation. This is the finding of experiments conducted by Jrgen Blum of the Technical University of Germany and Maya Krause of the Friedrich Schiller University, also based in Germany. The experiments were performed aboard an unmanned rocket that spent six minutes in microgravity in 1999. The researchers found that planets condense from dusty clouds when electrostatic forces hold sway over gravity.

Fish and foul

Red alert

The 'red tide', a densely populated algal bloom, is floating off the coast of China's eastern Yangtze river delta. It is threatening to contaminate seafood in Shanghai and a warning to the effect has been sounded to the residents by the media. The fishing industry in the Zhoushan Island region of the country's Zhejiang province has been warned that crabs, clams and other shellfish caught in the area could be harmful to the health of consumers.

Biopiracy bid?

is this another intellectual property rights (iprs) wrangle? Environmentalists recently alerted the Indian authorities to a us-sponsored scientific mission meant to survey and collect catfish species in Kerala and the Northeast. They alleged that the study was being undertaken without the Union government's permission.

Relative remedy

The Caspian Sea has been rapidly losing nutrients in the north of Iran due to uncontrolled growth in the number of comb jellyfish. But finally Iran seems to have found an antidote: Beroe ovata -- the jellyfish's own gelatinous cousin! Laboratory studies conducted by the Caspian Environmental Programme show that the presence of Beroe ovata in the Black Sea has decreased the comb jellyfish population in it since the former feeds on the latter.