Tag: Science

India’s drug regulator just approved the country’s first dengue vaccine, Qdenga. It is designed and claimed to protect against the four serotypes of the dengue-causing virus, called DENV-1 to DENV-4. Young children as well as adults (aged 4-60 years), irrespective of whether they have had dengue before, may be vaccinated with Qdenga. More than 40...

What is your height? This seemingly innocuous question, if you come to think of it, doesn’t always hand you the same answer. No, I’m not talking about the numerical part of the answer that is bound to be different for different people owing to their different heights. I am, instead, drawing your attention to the...

Towering 407 feet (124 metres), Starship soared from the company’s base at the southern tip of Texas. NASA monitored the flight, a critical step toward using the Starship as a lunar lander for moon crews. Elon Musk’s SpaceX replaced six of the 33 engines on the first-stage booster after they failed to ignite last week,...

Who were the people who left their dead in a cave 4,000 m above a Ladakhi village — and why does almost nobody alive carry their particular mix of ancestries? A study published in Science Advances on Friday has reported genome-wide data from ten individuals recovered from Old Lady Spider Cave, or Abi Srinjamo Bao,...

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is being poisoned by politicisation. With each passing year of late, it is a darker shadow of its once-formidable self, on the brink of a history in which it is no longer an engine of national growth. In the recent past, the organisation has suffered a non-trivial number of...

There have been a number of news reports recently about a startup in Bengaluru called Vimag Labs that has reportedly replaced rare-earth magnets in motors with so-called “virtual” magnets. One such report quoted Manish Seth, the start-up’s CEO, as saying: “We remove permanent magnets, replace them with copper coils, and then through software, we generate...

As spring approaches in the hyper-biodiverse Himalayas, birds that are accustomed to cooler climes migrate to the north. This is driven not just by temperature or precipitation alone, but also the availability of prey: arthropods (insects and spiders). But climate change is altering the rhythm of this dynamic. Scientists at the Centre for Ecological Sciences,...

Conventional bombs explode on or near a target surface, with the explosion and fragments, e.g. shrapnel, rendering the bomb’s damage. But when a target is buried deep under a mountain, the soil and rock mass surrounding it can absorb enough of the blast’s energy to keep the target from being damaged too much. This is...

The view that artificial intelligence (AI) can pose an existential threat to humankind using technologies like nuclear weapons has been around for some years now. Last year, after examining such threats and risks, one study from the Rand Corporation, a global policy think-tank, argued that such risks could not be ruled out. The study also...