Tag: Science

NASA, or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, has launched an initiative called ‘Your Name in Landsat’ as part of their Landsat programme to help pique interest in geological and space science  The tool can find one’s name (or any other text) among the vast geological structures of Earth. For example, the letters that make...

Imagine your houseplant sending you a message: “I’m thirsty — could you water me?” Or a rice  field alerting a farmer to a disease outbreak before a single leaf shows visible damage. These scenarios may sound like science fiction but researchers around the world are actively working to make them real. Welcome to the emerging...

Pursuing the mystery of how the Neanderthals went extinct, researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and of Montreal have now asserted that climate change was not the primary reason. Instead, they have reported that Homo sapiens succeeded because of their better social connectivity whereas the Neanderthals’ populations suffered the effects of poor social connections. The...

An Indian government notification on April 17 tapped ethanol to make Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF). Aviation has been hard to decarbonise because aircraft can’t use batteries or hydrogen at commercial scale yet, leaving SAF to be the primary way to comply with international emissions frameworks. To be usable in jet engines, however, ethanol is subject...

The story so far: On April 21, Union Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari said India should try to achieve 100% ethanol blending in the near future. He was speaking against the backdrop of India’s quest to become self-reliant in its energy needs. One-hundred percent blending refers to pure ethanol. It has the same...

The story so far: On April 21, Union Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari said India should try to achieve 100% ethanol blending in the near future. He was speaking against the backdrop of India’s quest to become self-reliant in its energy needs. Four days earlier, a government notification had also extended the use...

Invertebrate Cretaceous ‘krakens’ were apex predators The earliest finned octopuses were top predators that rivalled giant marine reptiles. By analysing large fossilised jaws, scientists have found two species — Nanaimoteuthis jeletzkyi and N. haggarti — that lived 100-72 million years ago and could have been 7-19 m long. Wear on the jaws indicated the octopuses...

In December last year, Union Minister Jitendra Singh said in reply to a question in Lok Sabha on the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) upcoming missions that the Department of Space had scheduled seven major missions by March 2026. Of these, only one — the LVM3 M6 mission by NewSpace India, Ltd. (NSIL) — was...

China announced on April 22 that it had selected Muhammad Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Daud of Pakistan to be its first batch of foreign astronauts. The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement that the two men will come to China as reserve astronauts for training, Global Times and Xinhua reported. After completing...

This article is part of Examined World, a contemplative series exploring what the sciences reveal about us. Our debates and discussions on technology are currently dominated by artificial intelligence (AI). Conversations around this subject are rarely about whether AI will envelop our lives or not, but about how and when it will do so.