Tag: Science

A single mosquito carrying malaria parasites can infect dozens of people. A single gene in that mosquito can spread slowly through its population. Gene drives aim to bend this inheritance in our favour by ensuring that a particular genetic change passes to far more than half of the offspring, helping reduce the disease burden. Whether...

Dams make rivers warmer downstream: satellite data Satellite data from 2013 to 2024 revealed that 71% of 287 large dams across the U.S. significantly altered water temperature downstream. In most cases, the water became warmer and — notably — maintained that temperature for at least 20 km downstream. The most extreme shifts occurred at dams...

On July 9, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) authorised a company named Reflect Orbital to launch and operate a test satellite designed to deploy a large mirror in orbit around the earth, despite the controversy and debate surrounding its aims. Eärendil-1 — named for a character in the Tolkien fantasy epic The Silmarillion —...

Kerala has long taken pride in its literacy, scientific temper, and environmental consciousness. Home to the biodiverse Western Ghats and centuries of traditional knowledge, it should have emerged as India’s leading hub for biological research and the bioeconomy. But instead, many of its premier biological research institutions are today on the decline. The reasons are...

GUWAHATI A team of scientists from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IITG) have developed a biological material that can remove lead from contaminated water. The team led by Professor Debasish Das of the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering found that cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, can be used to absorb lead from contaminated water. Such...

cienceA bird’s nest found near Ukraine’s front line has caught the attention of researchers, not because of the bird that built it but because of what it was made from. Mixed in with the usual twigs, grass and small branches were strands of fibre-optic cable, the same kind now used by military drones flying over...

Ask Indrakshi Raychowdhury what a quantum computer is bad at, and she points to arithmetic. “If you try to add two numbers, a classical calculator does it easily, whereas doing it on a quantum computer is incredibly difficult,” she said in a conversation with The Hindu. “But simulating a highly complex, interacting quantum system (where...

Quantum computing is becoming more popular – both as a field of study and in the public imagination. The technology promises more speed and more efficient problem-solving abilities, challenging the boundaries set by classical, conventional computing. The hype has led to inflated expectations. But whether or not it can meet them, the raison d’être of...

In a paper published in the Journal of Statistical Physics in 1980, the American physicist Paul Benioff described what is now called the quantum Turing machine: a model of a computer that operated according to the laws of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour of matter and light...