Tag: Science

The recent death of two people in Brazil during its dengue vaccination campaign, leading to the shot’s suspension on June 8, is a crucial wake-up call for India. This is because the dengue vaccine in Brazil, Butantan-DV, is pretty similar, if not identical, to India’s soon-to-be-launched dengue vaccine, DengiAll. Both the Brazilian and Indian vaccines...

Sea star sports nature’s optic fibres to focus light A remarkable structure in the chocolate-chip sea star (Protoreaster nodosus) has come to light. On the tip of each arm, a skeletal part contains an array of cone-shaped structures that, like optic fibres, transmit 70% of incident light and concentrate it nearly 3x at the base....

If you start looking up “1893 Chicago” in India, then the predictive autofill suggestions provided by the search engine likely concerns three main subjects. One of these revolve around Swami Vivekananda. It was in the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago that Vivekananda wowed the gathered audience with his historic address –  a speech...

he Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) has selected three Indian startups, including two from Bengaluru, as the first set of Indian Non-Governmental Entities (NGEs) for funding under its Technology Adoption Fund (TAF) Scheme. Bengaluru-based Astrobase Space Technologies and SatSure Analytics India, and Hyderabad-based TM2SPACE Technologies are the start-ups selected under the scheme...

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bhubaneswar has innovated a device to detect arsenic that would help improve water quality monitoring and public health. Researchers from the Sensors and Spectroscopy Research Group, School of Electrical and Computer Sciences (SECS), IIT Bhubaneswar, led by Sayan Dey have made significant advances in arsenic detection technologies, said the institute in...

Ants are associated with a range of very positive qualities — including a self-motivated work ethic, preparedness and long-term thinking, and a preference for collective effort. Many ant species are also social, and living in social groups offers many advantages. However, there are downsides too. Among humans, the occurrence of seasonal outbreaks of infections such...

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...