An illustration shows NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer approaching the moon as it enters its orbit in this artist’s concept. | Photo Credit: Lockheed Martin Space/Reuters A dishwasher-sized NASA satellite was launched into space from Florida on Wednesday to identify where water – a precious resource for lunar missions – resides on the moon’s surface in places … Read more
Photographers record images of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with Intuitive Machines’ second lunar lander as lifts off from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on February 26, 2025. | Photo Credit: AP A private company launched another lunar lander Wednesday (February 26, 2025), aiming to get closer to the … Read more
According to new research led by researchers at Stanford University in the US, coal-fired power plants are quietly depleting India’s rice and wheat output, destroying up to 10% of the yield in several states. The emissions from coal power plants include carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, sulphur oxides, fly ash, soot, suspended particulate matter, and other … Read more
America has already lost its global competitive edge in science, and funding cuts proposed in early 2025 may further a precipitous decline. Proposed cuts to the federal agencies that fund scientific research could undercut America’s global competitiveness, with negative impacts on the economy and the ability to attract and train the next generation of researchers. I’m an astronomer, and … Read more
A popular model of evolution concludes that it was incredibly unlikely for humanity to evolve on Earth, and that extraterrestrial intelligence is vanishingly rare. But as experts on the entangled history of life and our planet, we propose that the coevolution of life and Earth’s surface environment may have unfolded in a way that makes the evolutionary … Read more
“Who wants to live forever?” Freddie Mercury mournfully asks in Queen’s 1986 song of the same name. The answer: Quite a few people – so much so that life extension has long been a cottage industry. As a physician and scholar in the medical humanities, I’ve found the quest to expand the human lifespan both … Read more
Militaries that have taken power in Africa’s Sahel region – notably Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger – have put pressure on western mining firms for a fairer distribution of revenue from the lucrative mining sector. Gold is one of the resources at the heart of these tensions. West Africa has been a renowned gold mining hub for … Read more
Fragments of an explosive device, a radiation warning sign in the foreground, are displayed by Ukrainian authorities after a drone attack at the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Ukraine, Friday, February 14, 2025. | Photo Credit: AP Questions: 1. There are four ways to measure radiation dose. Of these, gray and X measure the absorbed … Read more
In this undated image released by Intuitive Machines, their newest lunar lander is displayed. | Photo Credit: Intuitive Machines via AP Intuitive Machines is “ready to go” with its second moon landing mission, a company executive said on Wednesday (February 26, 2025), a day ahead of the scheduled launch of its lunar lander. The … Read more
Prof. B D Vishwajit and Mahesh Tanwade at work in the animal house in Sharnbasva University, Kalaburagi. | Photo Credit: ARUN KULKARNI An advanced laboratory studies on rats and mice on reproductive toxicity and endocrine disruptive compounds by two scientists of Sharnbasva University has revealed disturbing facts of how harmful contents in some cosmetics and herbicides … Read more
Eighty million years ago humans, rats, and mice shared the same mammalian ancestor. More recently, researchers made the astonishing discovery that even today our genomes contain close to 500 segments that have remained totally unchanged since then. These segments are called ultra-conserved elements (UCEs). Nearly all the UCEs are also highly unchanged in the chicken … Read more
Environmental activists take part in a flash mob at Circo Massimo as the COP16 biodiversity conference resumes at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) headquarters in Rome, February 25, 2025. | Photo Credit: AFP Global talks to protect nature restarted Tuesday with a call for humanity to come together to “sustain life on the … Read more
More often than not, you may happen to hear a crack or a pop from your joints, especially during your PT or PE period and yoga classes. You might have been chided or even scolded for cracking your knuckles and been told it’ll lead to arthritis. Today, let’s explore the real reason behind our noisy … Read more
Sci-Five | The Hindu Science Quiz: On Fibonacci 1 / 5 | What are the first five numbers of the Fibonacci sequence? 0, 1, 1, 2, 3 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 4, 6, 8, 9, 10 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 The first five numbers of the Fibonacci sequence are 0, 1, 1, 2, … Read more
Time measurements and calendars have often been refined over the years. | Photo Credit: Alexey Savchenko/Unsplash A: A tropical year is the time (365.242199 days) the earth takes to revolve around the sun once. By having just 365 days in a calendar year, 0.242199 days are lost each year. To correct this error, Julius Caesar … Read more
An illustration shows a hypothetical picture of Mars 3.6 billion years ago when an ocean may have covered nearly half the planet, released February 24, 2025. The blue areas show the depth of the ocean filled to the shoreline level of the ancient, now-gone sea, dubbed Deuteronilus. The orange star represents the landing site of … Read more
Questions: 1. This material is one of the lightest solids known, since more than 99% of its composition by volume is air. Making it involves extracting the liquid component of a particular type of semisolid by supercritical freezing. Name it. 2. In the 1970s, a British hairdresser named Maurice Ward developed a material his granddaughter … Read more
This April 2024 image provided by NASA shows the SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) telescope at BAE Systems in Boulder, Colo. | Photo Credit: AP NASA will soon launch a new telescope which it says will create the “most colourful” map of the cosmos ever made. The SPHEREx … Read more
Encounters between baboons and people are common in parts of South Africa. WhatsApp groups often share stories of baboons raiding a kitchen and stealing all the food. And stories appear in the media about the torture and killing of baboons. Recently the hashtag #JusticeForRaygun has been widely shared on social media. A young male baboon named Raygun was being tracked as … Read more
Do artists and scientists see the same thing in the shape of trees? As a scientist who studies branching patterns in living things, I’m starting to think so. Piet Mondrian was an early 20th-century abstract artist and art theorist obsessed with simplicity and essence of form. Even people who have never heard of Mondrian will likely recognize his … Read more
Space is about to get more crowded for Elon Musk. The billionaire’s Starlink communications network is facing increasingly stiff challenges to its dominance of high-speed satellite internet, including from a Chinese state-backed rival and another service financed by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. Shanghai-based SpaceSail in November signed an agreement to enter Brazil and announced it … Read more
The sun sets next to a smokestack from a coal-burning power station in Beijing January 9, 2008. | Photo Credit: Reuters China aims to effectively eliminate severe air pollution by the end of 2025, a senior environment official said, as authorities ramp up efforts in pollution control and emissions reduction in the “battle for blue … Read more
Security personnel stand guard during a protest at in the Kangpokpi district of Manipur in November last year. | Photo Credit: PTI The ongoing conflict in Manipur has had a significant impact on the State’s economy. The revenue flow from GST has slowed down drastically, while retail inflation levels have skyrocketed. The double whammy came … Read more
General relativity and quantum mechanics are two highly successful theories. The former explains gravity and the latter teams up with special relativity to describe the other three forces of nature: electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear forces. However, scientists don’t know how gravity fits into quantum mechanics. In fact, they have been proposing experiments that … Read more
Data Point: Who, why, and how do Indians illegally migrate to the U.S.? | Video Credit: The Hindu As of February 17, the United States has deported 332 undocumented Indian immigrants. This number is only expected to rise. Nearly 40% of them were from Punjab, followed by Haryana and Gujarat. But, this is just one … Read more
Astronomers are excited to be poring over the first ever detailed geological map of the moon’s south polar region, where India’s Chandrayaan-3 lunar module, Vikram, touched down on August 23, 2023. The map is expected to throw new light on the moon’s origin and evolution. Researchers from the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Ahmedabad, Panjab … Read more
The human body was not built for spaceflight, with its microgravity conditions, exposure to high-energy radiation and other issues. As a result, trekking beyond the the earth’s confines causes many physiological changes that affect an astronaut’s health. Here is an explanation of some of the effects on human health caused by space travel. Why is … Read more
The three most common phases of matter or visible in this image: the solid earth, the liquid water, and a vaporous mist encircling the waterfall. | Photo Credit: Joshua Sortin Condensed matter physics is one of the largest, most active branches of contemporary physics research. Simply speaking, scientists in this field study the properties and … Read more
A view of Microsoft’s Majorana 1 chip. | Photo Credit: Microsoft In a head-turning announcement earlier this week, Microsoft unveiled a new quantum chip called Majorana 1. According to its press release, it consists of four qubits made of a “new state of matter”. Qubit is short for ‘quantum bit’, the fundamental unit of operations … Read more
Even as time is running out to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s goal of “eliminating” TB by 2025, the Health Ministry appears to be moving at glacial speed and is largely disinterested. A report submitted by the Health Technology Assessment of India (HTAIn) committee in February 2024 on two indigenously developed solutions to screen people … Read more