Tag: Science

The Gaganyaan mission envisages demonstration of human spaceflight capability by launching a crew of three members to an orbit of 400 km for a three-day mission and bringing them back safely to earth, by landing in Indian sea waters. | Photo Credit: FILE PHOTO Separating the crew module from the service module involves multiple precisely...

File photo of Mistral AI, the French artificial intelligence company. File | Photo Credit: Reuters European physics ‌research centre CERN and Mistral AI ​have signed a ⁠statement of intent to establish a long-term strategic partnership to develop ‌foundation models for scientific discovery, the two organisations ‌said on Thursday (October 15, 2026). The partners ‌aim ⁠to...

The French mathematician Hugo Duminil-Copin, who won the Fields Medal — mathematics’ Nobel — in 2022 for his work on phase transitions in statistical physics, said in a video call of the French Mathematical Society on October 8 that years of his research agenda had been “wiped out” thanks to a tumult of mathematical proofs and...

Jonathan is an Aldabra giant tortoise who lives at the residence of the governor of St Helena. He is 194 years old, the oldest living land animal on Earth today: the upper limit of the life expectancy for Aldabra tortoises is 93.68 years, making him some 100 years older than the typical upper lifespan limit...

In the crevices of boulders and beneath the rustle of leaf litter in the hills of the Eastern Ghats in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh lives a tiny population of the strikingly-patterned Jeypore ground gecko, which was presumed extinct for 130 years until it was rediscovered in 2010 by an Indian scientist. Just four individuals of...

In February, the Microsoft Quantum research group announced a new kind of computer processor called Majorana 1. According to the tech giant, the processor contained the world’s first topological qubits, built with a new material it called a ‘topoconductor’. Majorana 1 contained eight qubits, with Microsoft Quantum saying it would in future hold a million....

A: The null hypothesis is a cornerstone of scientific experiments. It is the hypothesis that an experiment tests. For example, if a hospital is testing a new drug, the null hypothesis will be that the drug has no effect. In this scenario, scientists are vulnerable to making two kinds of mistakes. One, the type I...

A: The tough outer covering of the eyeball is called the sclera. In humans, the sclerae (in both eyes) are white. This allows someone standing a distance away to easily say which way a person is looking. Scientists are not sure why human sclerae are white. Chimpanzees may have white, brown or darker sclerae. Bonobos...

More than 200 artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity researchers have called for immediate action to prevent further cases of AI models going rogue and posing a risk to critical infrastructure. The letter signed by luminaries in the field including Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton and Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, called for models relating to cybersecurity...