Tag: Science

A: The answer to this strange question is a stranger ‘yes’. When people walk freely in an open space, they often begin to move in a counter-clockwise circle. While scientists believed people were simply following those in front of them or reacting to boundaries, a new study in Nature Communications has found a biological bias...

NASA named three U.S. astronauts and an Italian astronaut on Tuesday (June 9, 2026) to serve as the crew for its next Artemis mission, a spacecraft docking demonstration in ‌Earth’s orbit next year that will test moon landers from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin for the ​first time in space. NASA Administrator...

In a 1983 paper, Harvard University geneticists James Gusella and Nancy Wexler reported that Huntington’s disease, a fatal inherited disease where brain cells progressively decay, was caused by a gene mutation on chromosome 4. This was the first time a single gene had been implicated in a disease. Since then, scientists have discovered about 5,000...

Modern computing is often effortless. You pick up a calculator or open the calculator app on your phone, and you’re on your way in seconds. But getting here took humans several centuries from when they first tried to speed up computing. One particularly important passage in this history involved the English mathematician Charles Babbage, who...

India has called for the shrinking pool of climate finance and a widening adaptation finance gap to be tackled head-on at the United Nations climate negotiations-linked talks under way in Bonn, Germany. It has urged that a Paris Agreement provision, which obliges developed countries to provide funds to developing nations, be given dedicated agenda space...

Droughts can increase the levels of antibiotic resistance in soil, a new study by researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has reported. Published in Nature Microbiology, the study revealed that when soil dries due to drought stress, the concentration of natural antibiotics increases, favouring the survival of resistant bacteria. The study also projected...

For most frogs, life begins as a game of odds. They lay their eggs in the water, where fish and insects gobble up about 98% of them before they even have a chance to hatch. The African grey foam-nest tree frog (Chiromantis xerampelina) figured a way out: it took its nest into the air. In...

Lung cancer is one of the more common cancers affecting people worldwide. This is mainly thanks to smoking and, to a lesser extent, air pollution and occupational exposure. According to the latest World Health Organization estimates, there are about 2.5 million new cases and 1.8 million deaths every year. Prevention offers the ideal solution to...

Most digital security relies today on random numbers to generate cryptographic keys. Think of a cryptographic key like a long, complex password. If that password is truly random, an attacker has to guess every possible combination. But if the ‘random’ process used to make that password has a pattern, the attacker can use that pattern...

The sun may well add to this year’s Deepavali celebrations, if predictions made by solar physicists come true. A solar flare that occurred on the Sun has triggered a magnetic storm which scientists predict will arrive at the Earth in the early hours of November 4, and this can give rise to spectacular displays of...