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A cat looks through the dusty screen door of a house undamaged by the wildfires in the Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California, U.S., January 28, 2025. | Photo Credit: Reuters Q: How many female cats were trained for the space flight that included Félicette? Félicette was the first cat to travel to space, launching on…
Read More “Sci-five | The Hindu Science Quiz: On the first cat in space” »
A team of researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) – Bombay have come up with a new technique that can measure the rate of iron coating degradation. This discovery claims to hold the potential of benefiting the steel industry. Metals corrode with time, and some metals corrode more than others, like iron rusts…
Read More “IIT Bombay researchers find a technique to measure degradation of iron coatings” »
Union Minister of Science and Technology and Minister of Earth Sciences Jitendra Singh. File | Photo Credit: ANI India will launch the Chandrayaan-4 mission to bring back samples of moon rocks to the Earth in 2027, Science and Technology Minister Jitendra Singh said. Chandrayaan-4 will involve at least two separate launches of the heavylift LVM-3…
Read More “Chandrayaan-4 to launch in 2027: Jitendra Singh” »
Kashmiri farmer and saffron producer Ghulam Mohammad Mir and his family pick saffron stigmas from the flowers at his residence in Kashmir’s Pampore October 31, 2024. | Photo Credit: Reuters Tucked in a valley beneath the snow-capped Himalayas of the Indian Kashmir region is the town of Pampore, famed for its farms that grow the…
Read More “Kashmir’s saffron growers experiment with indoor farming as climate pressures mount” »
The story so far An editorial titled ‘Predatory Journals: What Can We Do to Protect Their Prey’ was jointly published across the world’s most prestigious scientific journals in their first issue of January 2025. Unusually, all leading journals such as Nature, Science, The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, NMJI (and many more)…
Read More “Scamming science: predatory journals and the academic rat race” »
Although signs of La Nina were visible in the central Pacific, ocean temperatures in the eastern Pacific remained above normal, suggesting that the shift toward La Nina may be slowing or stalling. | Photo Credit: AFP The planet experienced its warmest January on record last month despite the development of La Nina, a climate pattern…
Read More “January 2025 was warmest on record despite La Nina’s cooling effect: EU climate agency” »
The dramatic surge of artificial intelligence (AI) has also made visible the machines humming underneath to make its applications possible. From their origins in being able to separate data into different groups, AI today excels at too many tasks to count. Just in 2024, smartphones have started to be sold with AI models built into…
Read More “A question for the AI age: do machines and humans learn the same way?” »
Prof. Janet Thornton. | Photo Credit: MURALI KUMAR K We have come a long way in understanding the structure of proteins, but in translating that into new medicines we are just starting, said renowned computational biologist Janet Thornton in an interaction with The Hindu. Lesson from COVID-19 “We saw with the COVID-19 virus how quickly the…
In the remote Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, a rare fungus grows inside dead caterpillars. In traditional Chinese medicine, this parasitic fungus is prized for its purported medicinal effects. Known as Ophiocordyceps sinensis – colloquially, caterpillar fungus or “Himalayan gold” – it can fetch astronomical prices on the herbal medicine market: up to US$63,000 per pound. Ophiocordyceps sinensis fungus is a parasite that…
I began practicing psychotherapy during the Reagan administration. Thirty years went by before distress about politics became a clinical issue for any of my clients. I remember the moment it first happened: There was a long voicemail from a distraught woman requesting therapy for anxiety and depression in reaction to the 2016 presidential election of Donald…
Read More “Trump trouble? A psychologist’s guide to dealing with political distress” »