Tag: Science

SpaceX on Thursday (May 21, 2026) scrubbed the launch of ​its 12th Starship rocket from Texas and said it ‌will attempt it again on Friday (May 22, 2026). Starship V3, uncrewed and ​featuring dozens of upgrades tailored for rapid ⁠Starlink satellite launches and NASA moon missions, was to be a key test for the vehicle...

The Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) replicates the earth’s atmosphere in earth orbit by managing air, water, temperature, and waste. In short-term space missions, all supplies are carried from the earth and waste is stored for disposal later. Long-duration missions recycle the waste back into useful resources like breathable air and clean water....

A: A heatwave is not like a wave or pulse of heat travelling through the air. The name probably comes from the way a heatwave feels, as something that spreads, surges, and overwhelms before subsiding. Some meteorologists prefer the team “heat event” instead. For example, in April and May, the sun is almost directly overhead...

GUWAHATI The jungles of Mizoram and neighbouring Myanmar have yielded a new-to-science snake that relishes worms and prefers to stay underground. The snake, Trachischium lalremsangai, has been described in the international Herpetozoa journal of the Austrian Herpetological Society by a team of four scientists from two continents. They are Virender K. Bhardwaj, Amit K. Bal, and Chhangte L....

Researchers at the BITS Pilani Hyderabad Campus have developed a new graphene-based electrode that could improve the performance and lifespan of supercapacitors, an emerging energy storage technology used in portable electronics, wearable devices, and microelectronic systems. The work was carried out by scientists at the MEMS, Microfluidics and Nanoelectronics (MMNE) Lab and published recently in...

Fires have burnt beneath the Jharia coal fields in Jharkhand for decades now, releasing smoke and gases through cracks in the ground. And according to a new study, parts of this underground fire system may burn hotter and release more greenhouse gases than previously estimated. Researchers from the U.K. and India, including the CSIR-Central Institute...

A: The solar wind is a stream of charged particles flowing outwards from the sun. As the solar wind nears the magnetic field of a planet, it becomes compressed near the magnetic boundaries. This creates a difference in pressure, or pressure gradient, that squeezes the charged particles along the magnetic field, away from the stream....

Nuclear reactions are processes that alter the identity of an atomic nucleus. Atoms in itself are incredibly small, and the atomic nucleus occupies less than one ten-trillionth of an atom’s volume, despite containing almost all of its mass. While chemical reactions involve the rearrangement of electrons, nuclear reactions alter protons or neutrons. Be it fission...

A: There is no one ‘best’ way to reach the moon because space travel always trades off between time, fuel, and payload mass. If a mission carries a human crew, mission designers will prioritise speed to minimise the astronauts’ exposure to space radiation, at the expense of burning more fuel. Conversely, a robotic cargo mission...

People who lived and died thousands of years ago have left behind their skeletal remains as a legacy. In recent years, scientists have isolated and sequenced the DNA from more and more of these remains. A team of researchers led by scientists at the Harvard Medical School in the U.S. has compared 15,836 ancient DNA...