Tag: Science

The Stevens Institute of Technology in the US recently said some of its scientists plus a group at Yale University will be building “the world’s first experiment explicitly designed to detect individual gravitons”. The announcement has already drawn sceptical attention from the physics community — but also $1.3 million from the W.M. Keck Foundation. The...

GUWAHATI Apple farm waste may soon help protect metal pipes, machinery, and infrastructure from corrosion. An international research team led by Nagaland University (NU) has found a way to turn discarded apple leaves into a highly effective, eco-friendly corrosion inhibitor, offering up to 96.2% protection for copper in harsh chemical conditions. The study, carried out...

A new state of matter appears to be a solid-liquid hybrid, scientists from Ulm University in Germany and the University of Nottingham in the UK have reported in the journal ACS Nano. The newfound material isn’t a slush or a gel in the macroscopic sense but refers to a specific atomic structure where different parts...

Every morning, you perform a small physics activity without realising it. You squeeze toothpaste out of a tube. You apply a force and the paste flows out like a liquid. When you stop squeezing, the toothpaste stays on the brush, holding its shape against gravity. It doesn’t drip, spread or collapse into a puddle. This...

A: In weather science, ‘visibility’ is a colloquial term for a quantity called the meteorological optical range. It’s defined as the distance a beam of light can travel through the atmosphere before its intensity drops to 5% of its original value. In an older time, a human observer would stand at a point and look...

The story so far: On January 12, the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) PSLV-C62 mission lifted off from Sriharikota carrying the EOS-N1 satellite along with 15 co-passenger satellites. Within minutes, ISRO said the mission had “encountered an anomaly during end of the PS3 stage”, and that a detailed analysis was initiated. What was the anomaly? In a televised briefing after the launch, ISRO chairman...

Datacentres are a growing share of global electricity consumption, and artificial intelligence (AI) is driving those power demands up. This is because AI datacentres use dense clusters of graphics processing units (GPUs) for running machine learning workloads, both when training large language models and deploying them. Since the generative AI boom shows no signs of...

Daily Quiz: On ISRO’s PSLV rocket Augmented Satellite Launch Vehicle | Photo credits: ISRO START THE QUIZ 1 / 6 | The liquid-fuelled second stage of the PSLV rocket uses the Vikas engine, which is based on the French Viking engine. In 1974, rather than pay cash, ISRO acquired this technology from France in exchange...

A: This is an illusion caused by the way our eyes and brains sample motion in discrete snapshots and the fact that fans have identical blades. Although a spinning fan changes continuously, we don’t perceive every intermediate position perfectly. Our visual system ‘integrates’ information over short time windows and updates its best guess of where...

The story so far: Futuristic space and marine biotechnology research focuses on using underexplored environments, such as the deep oceans and outer space, to develop new biological knowledge, materials, and manufacturing processes. Marine biotechnology involves studying microorganisms, algae, and other marine life to discover bioactive compounds, enzymes, biomaterials, food ingredients, and biostimulants. These organisms have...