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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…
File photo of the Google logo. | Photo Credit: Reuters Thousands of users across India found themselves abruptly locked out of Google Meet calls after what appears to have been a wide-scale service disruption. Reports clustered around error messages and “502 — Bad Gateway” notifications, with many users unable to access meetings. The outage struck…
The location of ‘Krishnan’ crater and nearby features | Photo Credit: Special arrangement A 3.5 billion-old crater on Mars will henceforth be known after M.S. Krishnan, the pioneering Indian geologist. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has approved it and several other names for Martian landforms proposed by two Kerala-based researchers. Apart from ‘Krishnan,’ the IAU…
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Protonemata grown by spore germination on BCDAT medium. (This article forms a part of the Science for All newsletter that takes the jargon out of science and puts the fun in! Subscribe now!) How far can plant life be pushed in harsh environments? Climate change as much as humans’ plans for colonies on the moon…
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Previous work had already shown that channel state information (CSI) from WiFi signals can be used to identify people in a room but CSI is harder to obtain and needs specialised hardware and firmware. | Photo Credit: Paul Hanaoka/Unsplash Modern WiFi standards have a feature called beamforming that helps routers push signals more efficiently towards…
For representative purposes. | Photo Credit: Getty Images 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…
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It’s the wax vapour rather than the solid or liquid wax that actually burns. | Photo Credit: Sixteen Miles Out/Unsplash Q: How can candle wicks hold a flame for so long? – Sadhika G. A: A candle wick holds a flame because it isn’t just a string that burns. Its main purpose is to deliver…
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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…
An image of concrete tetrapods used as wave breakers to prevent beach erosion. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement 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…
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In this photo released by the Afar Government Communication Bureau, ash billows from an eruption of the long-dormant Hayli Gubbi volcano in Ethiopia. | Photo Credit: AP 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…