Category: Science & Tech

The recent announcement that China awarded its first “practical PhDs”, doctoral degrees conferred for tangible products rather than traditional research papers, is a timely catalyst for a long-overdue conversation on the relevance, design, and culture of PhD education in India.  In China’s new model, doctoral candidates are evaluated on working prototypes and real-world applications instead...

A: Last, astronomers reported finding the most distant hydroxyl maser yet using the MeerKAT telescope. A hydroxyl megamaser is a giant and naturally occurring laser found in deep space. Just as a regular laser focuses visible light into a concentrated beam, a maser focuses microwave or radio waves. The ‘hydroxyl’ part refers to a simple...

From the lapis-laden trade routes of the Bronze Age, blue travelled east and west, carrying with it power, devotion, and value. By the Kushan period, between the 2nd and 4th centuries CE, ultramarine pigment was extracted from Afghan lapis lazuli through a complex and painstaking process of crushing it carefully and treating it with beeswax...

Radio whistles are first clear sign of Mars lightning Scientists have reported the first clear evidence of lightning on Mars. Using data from NASA’s MAVEN mission, they detected a type of radio wave called a whistler. On earth, whistlers are created by lightning strikes and get their name because they sound like a descending whistle...

By shrinking a QR code to the size of a microbe, researchers from the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) and the German-Austrian start-up Cerabyte have shown that the future of the digital world could depend on ceramics, one of the oldest and most durable materials known to humans. On December 3, the team secured...

The ascent of a launch vehicle is a battle against gravity to gain the immense velocity required to stay in orbit — while re-entry is a struggle against the atmosphere to shed that same energy in a systematic way. Initially, aerospace scientists believed that surviving atmospheric re-entry would be impossible because the massive kinetic energy...

The ascent of a launch vehicle is a battle against gravity to gain the immense velocity required to stay in orbit — while re-entry is a struggle against the atmosphere to shed that same energy in a systematic way. Initially, aerospace scientists believed that surviving atmospheric re-entry would be impossible because the massive kinetic energy...