Tag: Science

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...

Millions of people around the world drink mineral water every day because their tap water is unsafe or because they prefer the taste. It’s packed with naturally occurring minerals that support bone and muscle health and governments and health organisations promote it as a clean, reliable source of hydration. What is mineral water? Mineral water...

Military ships and oil tankers dominate how we imagine the Persian Gulf today. Yet beyond this familiar imagery of geopolitics and petroleum lies a mosaic of vulnerable ecosystems. It wasn’t always this way. Just six decades ago, these waters were busy not with warships but fishing boats, and the glittering megacities that now line the...

Scientists in Geneva took some antiprotons out for a spin — a very delicate one — in a truck, in a never-tried-before test drive that has been deemed a success. If this so-called antimatter came into contact with actual matter, even for a fraction of an instant, it would have been annihilated in a quick...

In 2006, London woke up to a tragedy. Six healthy men involved in a phase I clinical trial of theralizumab, a monoclonal antibody (mAb) designed to treat rheumatoid arthritis, developed multiple organ failure. The antibody triggered an intense immune reaction that the researchers didn’t observe in rhesus monkeys in preclinical tests because their immune cells...