Category: Science & Tech

Helium is famous for making balloons float, voices squeak, and as a critical resource for MRI machines and aerospace engineering. Helium is expensive and scarce, finding leaks quickly is essential, but that’s easier said than done because helium is also chemically inert and sensors, which usually rely on chemical reactors, have a tough time detecting...

– B.R. Sravan The main reason is surface temperature. Stars behave roughly as objects that absorb all incoming radiation and radiate energy back based solely on their temperature.The colour we see depends on the wavelength of light where the star emits the most energy. According to Wien’s law, hotter stars emit more energy at bluer...

Science Quiz: On medical disasters 1 / 6 | The drug shown here is created by slightly altering the chemical structure of Y. Name Y, whose use led to a tragedy in the 1950s and 1960s.

The hydrogen atom is the lightest in the universe and it consists of the simplest nucleus: a single proton. But while helium is the second-lightest element, its nucleus isn’t the second simplest. That distinction belongs to the deuteron, the nucleus of the deuterium atom, which contains one proton and one neutron. (Deuterium is an isotope...

In a milestone, India and the European Union (EU) have hailed the conclusion of the India-EU Free Trade Agreement (FTA) while launching a ‘Comprehensive Strategic Agenda’ for 2030. Among other measures, the pact moves beyond supply chains to operationalise joint R&D in advanced semiconductor “heterogeneous integration” and chip design. It also formally links the European...

For a long time, biomechanics experts believed that giant, extinct kangaroos were simply too heavy to hop. While the largest modern kangaroos weigh around 90 kg, their prehistoric relatives were much larger and weighed more than 250 kg. And scientists previously calculated that if you took the anatomy of a modern kangaroo and scaled it...

Living things dump a lot of heat into their surroundings. The universe is strict about conserving energy. If there’s a soup of cells and you make them settle down and work together in orderly fashion, you reduce the system’s entropy. In return you need to pay a ‘tax’ to the universe, to account for the...

Shruti Kumar (name changed) is a professor at a medical research institute, working on diagnosing a neglected tropical disease that infects almost a million new people every year. Prof. Kumar said that with the increasing number of requests by scientific publishers to peer review research manuscripts in recent years, the process takes so much of...