Tag: Science

Laika became the first animal to orbit the earth on this day in 1957. However, she died within hours of launch due to overheating. Photo: Mos.ru (CC BY) Published – November 04, 2026 05:11 pm IST Read Comments Copy link Email Facebook Twitter Telegram LinkedIn WhatsApp Reddit

Firecrackers on display at a stall in New Delhi. File photo. | Photo Credit: SUSHIL KUMAR VERMA/THE HINDU A: Green firecrackers — like those the Supreme Court of India recently allowed the residents of New Delhi to burst for two days for Deepavali — are designed to pollute the air less as they burn. According...

Laika, a stray mongrel selected for the mission, became the first animal to orbit Earth. Photo credit: Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics Published – November 03, 2026 05:11 pm IST Read Comments Copy link Email Facebook Twitter Telegram LinkedIn WhatsApp Reddit

Snails also can be left- or right-handed depending on which way their shells coil. | Photo Credit: Krzysztof Niewolny/Unsplash With a bit of penmanship, ‘e’ and ‘9’ can be made to look like mirror images of each other. While the ‘e’ swings counter-clockwise, the ‘9’ swings clockwise, written from top to bottom. Snails also can...

For representative purposes | Photo Credit: Getty Images Oncologists have long wrestled with a conundrum. Healthy human tissue often carries mutations that can drive cancer, but the tissue itself does not develop tumours. Clearly, a genetic spark alone is not enough. At the same time, chronic inflammation from smoking profoundly damages lung tissue long before...

For representative purposes | Photo Credit: Getty Images Na Wang, Raksha Padaki, Sara-Jayne Thursby and Michelle Vaz, ‘Chronic Cigarette Smoke Exposure Induces Distinct Stem Cell States Driving Genetic Driver-specific Non-small Cell Lung Cancer Subtypes’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 123, Issue No. 42, October 5, 2026 Oncologists have long wrestled with a...

U.S. President Donald Trump has often been the subject of deepfake images and videos. | Photo Credit: Pau Casals/Unsplash Many deepfake videos are easy to spot — the eyes move in strange ways, there’s an extra finger on a hand or the light is weirdly distributed — but many are just as hard, if not...

For decades, three computer scientists built their careers around an idea about the limits of what computers can do. Artificial intelligence may now have shown it to be wrong: OpenAI and Anthropic each said last week that one of their AI models had disproved the exponential time hypothesis (ETH). The hypothesis holds that some problems...

The Milky Way galaxy is ablaze with dust in this all-sky map from ‘Planck’, a European Space Agency mission with important NASA contributions. The towers of fiery colors are actually dust in the galaxy and beyond that has been polarised. | Photo Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech There have always been stories about them. Australian Aboriginal tales tell...

The tendency to bury is instinctive, meaning domestic cats need not anticipate a threat to perform the action. | Photo Credit: Alexas Fotos/Pexels — Avni Karnatak Cats bury their food, and their poop, for related but somewhat different reasons. They inherited both these habits from their wild ancestors, who developed them to conceal smells and...