Tag: Science

Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) researchers have reported that a new kind of nuclear fuel, touted for being able to allow India to take advantage of its vast thorium reserves, will not fit in the country’s three-stage programme and could entail expensive reactor redesigns. The study was published in Current Science. The composition the team...

In early 2021, as COVID-19 vaccines were being rolled out across the world, reports began to surface of a rare but alarming complication. Some people who received the shots were developing unusual blood clots. The cases were first identified in Europe and later in the U.S. Notably, they were reported mainly among recipients of the...

A new study published in Geophysical Research Letters has confirmed that global warming has entered a phase of significant acceleration. For decades, the earth’s temperature rose at a steady rate of about 0.2 °C per decade. Recent record-breaking years sparked a debate among scientists about whether this pace was increasing but natural events such as...

Imagine you are given three gumballs of different flavours. You are told that one of them is heavier than the others, and one is lighter. But which is which? Your task is made difficult by the fact that these gumballs weigh nearly nothing. And sometimes they swap flavours. Oh, and when you try to pick...

Supertough bug may also survive colliding worlds The bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans is famous for being able to survive extreme radiation and dryness. Researchers have found it can also survive the intense pressures of being blasted off of a planet’s surface: 14,000-24,000 earth atmospheres. Genetic analysis revealed the survivors focused on DNA repair and iron transport...

Of all the irreconcilable splits in science journalism, the one concerned with what we write about and how we go about has been my bugbear. On the one hand there are journalists focused on telling stories through people. On the other are journalists like me who believe there is more to acknowledging the world and...

As the global population increases, the need for more sustainable and nutritious food sources becomes greater. In this context, the book Biomass Conversion and Sustainable Biorefinery edited by Lubis et al. in 2024,highlights recent advances in using wasted biomass from conversion and biorefinery concepts and discusses how biomass waste and by-products can be minimised by...

When pregnant women experience higher ambient temperatures during gestation, fewer males are born, a recent analysis of demographic and health surveys in sub-Saharan Africa and India, showed.   A paper titled ‘Temperature and sex ratios at birth’ in the journal Demography, by Jasmin Abdel Ghany et al., concludes after a detailed analysis that experiencing higher ambient temperatures during pregnancy is associated with changes in the natural sex ratio at...

While the death of James Watson on November 6, 2025, closed a famous chapter in the history of DNA, it also opened a necessary conversation about who we choose to remember, how, and why. The discovery of the double helix structure of the DNA remains a scientific triumph but it’s also a cautionary tale of...