Tag: Science

Research fraud is a global problem and has become worse due to the growing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The problem is even more acute in India’s higher education sector where both the number of journal publications and retractions are growing rapidly. However, journal retractions do not capture the scope of research fraud since it...

Science quiz: 110 years of general relativity Each exact solution of the mathematical relations of general relativity (Q1) has a name. Name this person, who solved the relations for what space looks like around a spherical and non-rotating black hole, while serving as a soldier in World War I. START THE QUIZ 1 / 6...

A collaborative study by researchers from three Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) has found that adding tetrapod-shaped nanoparticles to certain synthetic plastics can significantly reduce their viscosity, making them easier and less energy-intensive to process. Plastics owe their versatility to long molecular chains called polymers, which make them moldable and stretchable. However, many synthetic plastics...

Hayli Gubbi is a shield volcano in Afar, Ethiopia, and a member of the Erta Ale Range. It’s located at the edge of the East African Rift where the African and Arabian plates are slowly pulling apart. A shield volcano is a broad, gently sloping volcano that consists of many thin, fluid lava flows. Its...

Pancreatic cancers are aggressive and deadly, with high rates of metastasis and poor prognosis. The tumour environment is also hypoxic: the cells rapidly divide and thrive in very low oxygen conditions. Now, IIT-Bombay researchers have shown that the hypoxia ends up enhancing the cells’ metastatic behavior. By affecting the cells’ plasma membrane lipids, hypoxic conditions...

Passenger Internet on aeroplanes used to be rare in the 2010s but has become almost commonplace today. On most flights, the basic idea is that the whole aeroplane is treated like a flying Wi-Fi router that connects to the rest of the Internet through a long backhaul link. This means your phone or laptop never...

In a major taxonomic revision of bush frogs, the Dehradun-based Wildlife Institute of India (WII) has recorded 13 new-to-science species of amphibians from the northeastern part of the country. These new species have been described in a study published in the latest issue of Vertebrate Zoology, an international journal. The authors of the study are Bitupan...

When, in 1960, the British primatologist Jane Goodall first observed chimpanzees at Gombe National Park in Tanzania using twigs to fish termites out of anthills, she was making scientific history. Researchers had until then believed only humans could use tools. Goodall’s discovery erased that line as well as raised important questions about what it means...

Researchers at the Raman Research Institute (RRI) have built a new device that reveals how thick everyday fluids like gels, shampoos, and industrial solutions behave deep inside, a breakthrough that can help improve extraction and production processes across industries.  By showing how these fluids respond to even a single moving object, the method gives companies a...

A: A random forest is a machine-learning method that makes predictions by combining the decisions of many simpler models called decision trees. A decision tree works like a tree from bottom-up. At each node, it asks a question about the data, e.g. “is a person’s age greater than 30?”. Then, depending on the answer, it...