Category: Science & Tech

A team led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine has found that several inherited traits in the mouse genome break the rules Gregor Mendel laid down in the 19th century about how genes work. This is not because the genes mutate but because of chemical modifications of the genome that can jump...

The story so far: A Bengaluru-based space company, Astrobase Space Technologies, on Friday (August 7, 2026) unveiled India’s first privately built 800 kN Full-Flow Staged Combustion (FFSC) LOX-Methane rocket engine named EVEREST. This makes India the fourth nation to have FFSC engine technology after Russia, USA and China. What are high thrust FFSC rocket engines?...

Scientists use AI to design viruses to kill hardy bacteria Scientists have used AI to design entire genomes for bacteriophages, viruses that infect and kill bacteria. Using ‘genome language models’, they generated thousands of new DNA sequences, then used them with a well-studied virus called ΦX174 as a template to yield 16 functional viruses. These...

The political scientist Claudine Gay became Harvard University’s dean of social science in 2018 and, five years later, its first Black president and only the second woman in the university’s 387-year history in the post. Later that year, on December 5, 2023, Ms. Gay testified before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce...

The political scientist Claudine Gay became Harvard University’s dean of social science in 2018 and, five years later, its first Black president and only the second woman in the university’s 387-year history in the post. Later that year, on December 5, 2023, Ms. Gay testified before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce...

(This article forms a part of the Science for All newsletter that takes the jargon out of science and puts the fun in! Subscribe now!) When a certain brilliantly-coloured butterfly, found halfway around the globe—from India to Japan—closes its wings, you cannot tell it apart from a dead leaf: the ‘dead leaf’ butterfly’s wings turn a...