The Geeky Eco Warrior

The city is reeling under the worst water crisis in 30 years. Chennai is facing a drought for the third year in a row. The city went without a single drop of rain for   about 200 days , the city had a brief shower last week. Too little and too late for a city that is experiencing its worst water crisis in 30 years. The city’s primary water source — its groundwater has been tapped to the fullest. The four sources that replenish the groundwater — Red Hills Lake, Poondi reservoir, Sholavaram lake and Chembarambakkam tank, in addition to the water desalination plants at Nemelli and Minjur —  are now dry . Against a total of 11.257 thousand million cubic feet (TMC) capacity, the four reservoirs supplying water to Chennai have  less than 35mcft water left in store . The demand for water in the city has gone up by 47% in the last decade from  750 million litres per day (MLD) in 2008 to 1,100 MLD in 2018 . In the same period, the metro...

Suffering from medical conditions such as diabetes, anxiety, depression and psychosis? Worry not. Dr Facebook is here to diagnose and rescue. But do you want to be? Have you been posting about religion and using religious language like "God" or "pray" in your Facebook posts recently? And do you think it is sweet of you to do so? Maybe not. Maybe it is time to go off real sweets for a bit and get your blood glucose levels checked as you might be 15 times more likely to have diabetes than your friends who have not posted about God in a while now. Or so says a  medical research  by Penn Medicine and Stony Brook University scientists that was  published in PLOS ONE science journal . According to them, language in Facebook posts may help identify medical conditions — such as diabetes, anxiety, depression and psychosis in patients —as it is believed that language in social media posts could be indicators of diseases. Your Facebook status may be revealing more than you thi...

As you keep denying data and science, President Trump, air pollution is choking your electorate. Dear President Trump, Greetings from the  most polluted capital of the world .  This is regarding the statement you made in a  conversation with Prime Minister Varadkar of Ireland  in Shannon in June this year. You had said, "We have the cleanest air in the world, in the United States, and it’s gotten better since I’m President." Sorry to break your little bubble, President Trump, but nothing could be further from the truth. In your country, the air quality is worse in the past two years than it has been in the past — just a few years prior. The past, in fact, saw your country vastly improving the air quality from the earlier deteriorations. And by past, we mean before you took oath as the President in 2017. Air pollution kills, sir. Ask us Indians —  specifically Delhiites  — and we can tell you in volumes about how it feels to be breathing the t...

  The rivers of the world are coursing with unhealthy levels of antibiotics, over-the-counter and prescription drugs waste, a top-level UK study has revealed. In the  study , researchers analysed samples from 711 sites across rivers in 72 countries for 14 commonly used antibiotics and found that 65% of them were contaminated with antibiotics — some up to 300 times the “safe” levels. This worst-case scenario was found at a site on the river Brahmaputra in Bangladesh where concentrations of the drug Metronidazole — an antibiotic used to treat bacterial infections including skin and mouth infections. The samples included some of the world's best-known rivers — including the Brahmaputra, Chao Phraya, Danube, Mekong, Seine, Thames, Tiber and Tigris. According to the reports,  dangerous levels of contamination  were most frequently found in Asia and Africa. However, while the sites in Bangladesh, Kenya, Ghana, Pakistan and Nigeria were found to be exceeding safe ...