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The Scientists for Genetic Diversity, a group of scientists, has written to Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav, and the Director General of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research M. L. Jat expressing its concern over the “compromise proposal” presented at the 11th session of the governing body (GB11) of…
Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft blasting off the launch pad at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. | Photo Credit: AFP The Baikonur cosmodrome is a spaceport in Kazakhstan that Russia leases and operates as the site of its space launches. It was built in the 1950s first as a missile test range before becoming the centre of…
India produces a large amount of sugarcane. | Photo Credit: Getty Images A recent paper by Olivier Garsmeur and colleagues titled ‘The genomic footprints of wild Saccharum species trace domestication, diversification, and modern breeding of sugarcane’ in the journal Cell conducted genomic analyses of 390 sugarcane breeds from Australia, Brazil, China, France, French Polynesia, India,…
Read More “The many roles of sugarcane in India and the world” »
“During this phase, the science orbit will be maintained via regular manoeuvres, scheduled to avoid or minimise conflicts with science observations. Extensive calibration and validation activities will take place,” the ISRO had said earlier. File | Photo Credit: NASA via PTI The NASA ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) satellite, launched in July, has entered the…
Read More “NISAR earth observation satellite enters final science operations phase” »
A prototype of the MATSYA 6000, a submersible made by Chennai’s National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT). | Photo Credit: Ravindran R. A crucial set of tests on the Samudrayaan, India’s first manned-submersible dive into the ocean, is likely only mid-next year following a delay in the procurement of syntactic foam cladding from France. The…
Read More “Foam cladding from France delaying India’s Samudrayaan mission” »
The effects of feminising gender-affirmative hormone therapy (GAHT) are more than skin deep, new research in Nature Medicine has reported, with the changes going down to the very proteins circulating in a person’s blood. University of Melbourne endocrinologist Ada Cheung, who co-led the study, has called the findings “a world-first”. Sanjay Kalra, an endocrinologist and…
Read More “Feminising hormone therapy can alter proteins in transwomen’s blood” »
On November 26, a fire started on scaffolding at the Wang Fuk Court housing complex in Tai Po in Hong Kong and spread rapidly across multiple high-rise blocks wrapped in bamboo and other flammable external materials. At least 44 people had died as of 7 am IST (November 27) while hundreds were missing. The local…
Read More “Hong Kong blaze: Why buildings have disastrous fires and how they can be prevented” »
Imagine watching the brain not as a finished organ but as a city under construction, where every neuron is a worker changing jobs as the skyline rises. A series of papers in Nature published on November 5 has captured exactly that. Led by researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in the USA, together…
Read More “How groundbreaking new brain atlases capture development in motion” »
China has finished building its Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), a bittersweet development given that the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) has been in limbo for years. Both JUNO and INO were designed to study subatomic particles called neutrinos, which are very hard to catch because they rarely interact with matter. This is why both INO…
China has finished building its Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), a bittersweet development given that the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) has been in limbo for years. Both JUNO and INO were designed to study subatomic particles called neutrinos, which are very hard to catch because they rarely interact with matter. This is why both INO…