Tag: Science

The story so far: Theoretical physicist Deepak Dhar has been awarded the Dirac Medal for his contributions to statistical physics — an honour he is sharing with three other physicists, Bernard Derrida, Marc Mézard, and Haim Sompolinsky. The Dirac Medal is awarded by the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, on the...

The International Centre for Theoretical Sciences on Monday (August 10, 2026) said that its professor Deepak Dhar has been awarded the prestigious 2026 Dirac Medal, recognising his contributions to statistical mechanics and complex systems. Prof. Dhar, who is an Indian National Science Academy (INSA) distinguished professor at ICTS, shares the honour with three other stalwarts...

As the immune system ages, it enters a state of chronic, low-grade inflammation called ‘inflammaging’. In the brain, inflammaging is especially damaging. Immune cells that normally clear toxic amyloid-beta, a protein that can clump together to form the plaques characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease, instead become dysfunctional, fuelling the neuroinflammation that drives the disease. So a...

— Sahitya Agrawal, Raxaul A: The brain’s biological clock is a network of genes and proteins whose concentrations rise and fall in a roughly daily cycle. There is a cluster of neurons in the hypothalamus called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). Inside SCN neurons, certain genes are switched on to produce certain proteins. At one point,...

From the killer shark of Jaws to the tornado-tossed predators of the Sharknado movies, films long have portrayed sharks as objects ‌of summer fear. But when a shark cuts through the waters off the U.S. East Coast, ​it now may be doing more than hunting. It may also be gathering data that helps scientists understand...

Nature has four fundamental forces: gravity, the weak force (responsible for radioactivity), electromagnetism, and the strong force. The strong force is responsible for keeping the protons and neutrons together in the nuclei of atoms. The theory describing the strong interaction between two particles is called quantum chromodynamics (QCD). In QCD, the strong force is carried...

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...