Rubab's story links

The quest by executives and venture capitalists to build a next-generation biofuels industry has made strides this year as oil reached $100 a barrel and the world's largest energy consumer laid down ambitious new mandates for alternative fuels.

No one keeps track of time better than Ferenc Krausz. In his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, he has clocked the shortest time intervals ever observed. Krausz uses ultraviolet laser pulses to track the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms. The events he probes last for about 100 attoseconds, or 100 quintillionths of a second. For a little perspective, 100 attoseconds is to one second as a second is to 300 million years.

CO2 certainly gets most of the doomsday ink, and for good reason. In terms of sheer weight, it accounts for around 85 percent of America's greenhouse gas emissions, which amounted to 7.074 billion metric tons in 2004; methane accounts for just 8 percent of that frightening total.

People who eat a lot of red meat and processed meats have a higher risk of several types of cancer, including lung cancer and colorectal cancer, U.S. researchers reported on Monday. The work is the first big study to show a link between meat and lung cancer. It also shows that people who eat a lot of meat have a higher risk of liver and esophageal cancer and that men raise their risk of pancreatic cancer by eating red meat.

Population rate in Pakistan has reduced down to 1.86 percent and efforts are underway to reduce it even further, Minister for Population Welfare Chaudhry Shahabaz Hussain informed Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz. Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said that Population growth rate has to be controlled so that the benefits of economic growth reach to the maximum number of people.

Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and landslides are some of the additional catastrophes that climate change and its rising sea levels and melting glaciers could bring, a geologist says

A news report by the U.N. World Health Organization says that environmental hazards are responsible for the deaths of several million children every year. The report, titled Principles for Evaluating Health Risks in Children Associated with Exposure to Chemicals, highlights the fact that in children, the stage in their development when exposure occurs may be just as important as the magnitude of the exposure.