Category: Science

For years, farmers across India have struggled to protect mango, guava, sapota, and other citrus crops from the attack of fruit flies. Now, after three years of research and trials, scientists at the National Bureau of Agricultural Insect Resources (NBAIR), Bengaluru, (under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research) have developed a device – ‘Shatpada Fruit…

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Science quiz: Tinkering with storms Visual: Name this 1947 hurricane that became the subject of controversy after its sharp turn to the northeast, into Florida, was blamed on cloud-seeding. START THE QUIZ 1 / 6 | Name this 1947 hurricane that became the subject of controversy after its sharp turn to the northeast, into Florida,…

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Ion chromatography, or the process of separating ions from a sample by passing it through a long column, is usually carried out in a laboratory using expensive, sophisticated equipment. Now, scientists at the University of Tasmania in Australia have devised a simpler way to perform the technique out in the field — one that could…

Read More “Portable ion chromatograph brings real-world practice to classrooms” »

A Kanizsa triangle. | Photo Credit: Fibonacci (CC BY-SA) A: Our brains fall for optical illusions because of the ways in which they perceive the world, including using contextual information, shortcuts, and predictions. Among other patterns, the brain assumes light comes from above, fills missing edges, and exaggerates contrasts. While these tricks help us navigate…

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Ice is almost everywhere on the earth — in glaciers, snow, and clouds. Despite being so common, it still hides mysteries about its physical properties. A long-standing puzzle concerns its electrical behaviour. Every water molecule is polar, meaning it has a positive and a negative end. But when water freezes into ordinary hexagonal ice (known…

Read More “Bending ice could explain how lightning is born in thunderstorms” »

Examples of Early and Middle Holocene human burials from southern China. This figure shows six human burials from Huiyaotian in Nanning and Liyupo in Long’an, both shell-midden sites located in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. | Photo Credit: PNAS 122 (38) e2515103122 Archaeologists working in southeast Asia have long been puzzled by pre-farming burials dating…

Read More “Dawn of artificial mummification pushed back 5,000 years” »

While pigments interact with light and their surroundings to produce specific colours, the hex triplet #1099D6 (shown) approximates what manganese blue might have looked like. | Photo Credit: Google Jackson Pollock’s Number 1A, 1948 is one of the most famous examples of action painting, where paint is dripped, splashed, and layered onto a surface. While…

Read More “Science for All | Quest to crack blues mystery in Pollock painting reveals colour-tuning technique” »

These days, an inky, sightless night is a rare sight in much of the world. From the harsh glare of streetlamps that make us squint to the gaudy flicker of neon billboards that force sunglass shields, artificial light is blurring the line between day and night. This has meant birds stay active for almost an…

Read More “As the lights stay on, birds are staying up past their bedtime” »

In a small persimmon orchard in northern Greece, scientists carefully open paper bags to release thousands of flies, in an experiment aimed at blunting the destructive impact of new invasive species. The insects are sterile male Mediterranean fruit flies (Ceratitis capitata), a pest that annually causes significant damage to crops in Naousa, where a large…

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The U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) calls mosquitoes the “world’s deadliest animals”. They have good reason. Small, annoying but dangerous: this disease-carrying insect helps kill more than a million people in the world every year. Now, as the world becomes warmer, their domain could be expanding. Previously, mosquitoes were only a concern…

Read More “Mosquitoes suck — but should we simply get rid of them?” »