Tag: Science

For more than a century, physicists have looked for a material that conducts electricity with zero resistance at room temperature — practical enough to transform how the world generates and uses energy. But for a long time, the highest temperature at which a material became superconducting at room pressure was -140 °C. Some other materials...

Last week, the Minor Planet Centre (MPC) announced 15 new moons had been found, four around Jupiter and 11 around Saturn. The Jovian moons were found by the U.S.-based Scott Sheppard and David Tholen and the Saturnian ones by a team led by Edward Ashton in Taiwan. The MPC is the world’s primary repository for...

From African deserts to the Arctic circle: humans spread across the planet faster and farther than any other wild vertebrate, making us outliers in the animal kingdom. While we occupy 132 million sq. km of land, a typical wild mammal occupies 165 sq. km. How did humans achieve this feat?   The answer lies in...

The Hindu’s weekly Science for All newsletter explains all things Science, without the jargon. In an astonishing discovery in 2009, a mission to the moon chanced upon traces of water on the craggy celestial body 3,80,000 km from Earth. Now, scientists have said that distant moons, far away from planets and even the sun, may...

Are the risks to structures in the Himalayas and north-eastern states from earthquakes overestimated? Scientists, structural engineers, representatives from several government ministries are expected to deliberate and report back to the Cabinet Secretariat in the coming weeks. This follows a ‘withdrawal’ earlier this month by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) of a set of...

All living beings communicate. In honeybees, communicative signals in the form of a wiggle dance transmit information on the location of flowers. Recipient bees decode this information and use it to guide their behaviour. Human language goes beyond broadcasting: it can be used to intentionally reshape what another person thinks or does by adjusting the...

The story so far: A fire tore through a house in Indore on March 18, killing eight people including two children. An electric vehicle (EV) charging point outside the house appeared to have sparked the blaze. An investigation is underway. Are EV batteries safe? Nearly every EV on the road today runs on lithium-ion batteries,...

Ever since Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, the first planet of the solar system — Mercury — has also become its smallest. Mercury might be the smallest planet orbiting the sun, but studying it is no mean feat. In fact, it is quite the opposite, as studying Mercury is quite a challenge.  Did...