Category: Science & Tech

The story so far: Climate change is real, and for India to continue meeting domestic food demands, agriculture needs to cope with the increasing unpredictability of the weather, declining soil health, and growing air pollution. What is climate-resilient agriculture? Climate-resilient agriculture uses a range of biotechnology and complementary technologies to guide farming practices and reduce...

A: Your smartphone knows which way is up due to its accelerometer. It’s a chip whose parts shift slightly when the phone accelerates or when gravity acts along a particular direction. The phone’s software reads the accelerometer’s measurements along the x, y, and z directions and figures out which side is pointing towards the earth....

The Greenland shark can live up to 500 years. The kind of longevity that probably has something to do with its home: cold, dark depths of the North Atlantic Ocean and Arctic Ocean. Scientists have been studying the sharks’ biology — from its slow metabolism to cellular repair — to find answers for healthy ageing...

In October 2020, when the world was beginning to come out of a global lockdown, a spacecraft more than 3 lakh km away performed a pogo-stick jump on a small asteroid called Bennu and collected samples of its surface. The craft, part of NASA’s OSIRIS REx, then launched itself away from the asteroid and towards...

Researchers from the University of Guelph in Canada have reported an astonishing discovery: that the number of chromosome sets in their bodies’ cells seems to be linked to the rate at which the species’ mitochondrial genome evolves. This is unusual because mitochondrial DNA sits in a separate genome from the chromosomes in the nucleus and...