Tag: Science

— Prabhakar Jonnalagadda A: To preserve a food item meant to remove moisture, increase acidity and/or to use natural preservatives. Meats and fish would be hung over fires before departure as the smoke deposited antimicrobial compounds into the flesh. Then, sailors would pack meat in wooden barrels with dry salt. Fish, especially cod, was dried...

India’s long wait for a dengue vaccine may finally be coming to an end. Takeda’s tetravalent dengue vaccine, TAK-003 (called ‘Qdenga’), recently received clearance from the Subject Expert Committee (SEC) under the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) for use among individuals aged 4 to 60 years. This marks a significant milestone in the country’s...

The NASA Artemis II mission is set to launch no earlier than April 1, 2026. If the lift-off is successful, the giant rocket will send humans to near the moon for the first time in more than half a century. In so doing, it will make an important milestone for the U.S. space programme. Its...

Scientists have shown that helium atoms can be entangled through their movement. A team from Australia and the U.S. collided clouds of helium atoms together to create pairs that shared a single quantum state. The achievement showed that even ‘heavy’ particles could follow the same strange quantum physics rules that scientists have mostly observed so...

Throughout human history, the sky symbolised freedom — vast, open, untouched. Today, that no longer holds. The earth’s orbital environment has become crowded, fragile, and vulnerable, threatened by what is today evidently a failure of governance rather than just of engineering. The language of space sustainability has grown familiar in international forums and policy documents....

Parkinson’s disease affects more than 10 million people worldwide. A patient struggles to perform coordinated movement, requiring conscious effort and attention even for a simple task like buttoning a shirt. Natural movements like walking and turning have to be planned as the person will struggle to start and stop actions. Over time, the person will...

In a study published in the journal Clean Water on March 28, scientists reported that extracellular RNA (exRNA) from bacteria can persist in disinfected drinking water. They also found that by studying the exRNA, they could figure out what the bacteria were doing just before they were damaged or killed, releasing the exRNA. This way,...

GUWAHATI A team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IIT-G) have developed energy-efficient bricks designed to keep buildings naturally cool, offering a solution for sustainable construction. The researchers are Bitupan Das, Urbashi Bordoloi, Pushpendra Singh, and Pankaj Kalita of the IIT-G’s School of Energy Science and Engineering and the School of Agro...

Microgravity can alter sperm’s ability to navigate Researchers used a device that mimicked the weightlessness of space to check how microgravity affected human, mouse, and pig cells. They found microgravity impaired sperm’s ability to navigate but also that high doses of progesterone could partially reverse this impairment. Up to 24 hours of microgravity also delayed...

Canopied with vibrant little star-shaped flowers, the tropical milkweed shrub is a favourite of millions of migrating monarch butterflies in America, which lay their eggs on them, feed on their leaves and stems as caterpillars, and then as strikingly patterned butterflies, feast on the flowers’ nectar, among other plants. The plant does more for the...