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Rice is a C3 plant, and C3 photosynthesis is less water-efficient in hot or dry conditions than C4 plants, e.g. maize. | Photo Credit: Steve Douglas/Unsplash A: Many rice-growing systems deliberately flood the fields and most of the water is lost to the air or to the ground. Farmers often maintain shallow flooding to stabilise…
“Solving mathematical problems gave me a unique sensation of freedom that did not depend on what happened around me,” confessed Irina Kmit, a Ukrainian mathematician, now a professor in the mathematics department at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research topics include hyperbolic differential equations and boundary value problems. And she described maths as a…
Read More “Narrating stories of the world’s women mathematicians, in portraits” »
One of the strongest materials on the earth isn’t made in a factory or synthesised in a laboratory but spun by a creature barely two inches long. The Darwin’s bark spider (Caerostris darwini), found in the forests of Madagascar, weaves silk that outperforms steel and most human-made fibres in both strength and toughness. Larger webs,…
Read More “Why only female Darwin’s bark spiders weave the toughest webs” »
Since the end of World War II, the US has established a global military network consisting of around 750 bases in roughly 80 countries. While the US government has characterised this presence as a stabilising force, the local populations have often paid for the military’s presence with displacement and long-term exposure to hazardous industrial waste….
Read More “As Trump floats buying Greenland, Arctic island still holds toxic US waste” »
Since the end of World War II, the US has established a global military network consisting of around 750 bases in roughly 80 countries. While the US government has characterised this presence as a stabilising force, the local populations have often paid for the military’s presence with displacement and long-term exposure to hazardous industrial waste….
Read More “As Trump floats buying Greenland, Arctic island still holds toxic US waste” »
This screengrab from video provided by NASA TV shows the SpaceX Dragon departing from the International Space Station shortly after undocking with four NASA Crew-11 members inside on January 14 14, 2026. | Photo Credit: NASA/AP A: On January 15 morning, Crew-11 to the International Space Station (ISS) performed a rapid evacuation, with NASA getting…
Read More “What happens if you have a medical emergency onboard the ISS?” »
The Stevens Institute of Technology in the US recently said some of its scientists plus a group at Yale University will be building “the world’s first experiment explicitly designed to detect individual gravitons”. The announcement has already drawn sceptical attention from the physics community — but also $1.3 million from the W.M. Keck Foundation. The…
Read More “Scientists plan to build a graviton detector. Why is it so hard?” »
Prof. Ambrish Singh (R), Nagaland University, with Prof. Yujie Qiang, National Centre for Materials Service Safety, University of Science & Technology Beijing. Photo credits: Special Arrangement GUWAHATI Apple farm waste may soon help protect metal pipes, machinery, and infrastructure from corrosion. An international research team led by Nagaland University (NU) has found a way to…
Read More “Apple leaf waste yields green anti-corrosion solution for metals” »
An image from the paper showing the corralling effect in action. | Photo Credit: ACS Nano, 2025, 19 (50), 42002-42012 A new state of matter appears to be a solid-liquid hybrid, scientists from Ulm University in Germany and the University of Nottingham in the UK have reported in the journal ACS Nano. The newfound material…
Every morning, you perform a small physics activity without realising it. You squeeze toothpaste out of a tube. You apply a force and the paste flows out like a liquid. When you stop squeezing, the toothpaste stays on the brush, holding its shape against gravity. It doesn’t drip, spread or collapse into a puddle. This…
Read More “Soft matter: the unusual yet persistent physics inside your bathroom cabinet” »
