Category: Science

India has a plan to carve out a beachhead in the battle for commercial space, officials say: crunching space data, building small satellites and launching them cheaply into orbit rather than challenging heavyweights such as SpaceX head-on. In particular, it is taking aim at providing cost-effective services and hardware to sectors such as communications, agriculture…

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A biobank is a repository of biological samples, such as blood, DNA, cells, tissues, and/or organs alongside their genetic data. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto Precision medicine is bringing in a new era of personalised healthcare. The field began to take concrete shape when scientists were wrapping up the Human Genome Project. Since then, genomics…

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Ladakh’s recent sightings of aurora, marked by reddish or greenish light in the night sky and usually observed in the far northern regions, is a validation of our efforts in space weather monitoring, a team of astrophysicists that predicted the activity about 48-72 hours prior said. The appearance of intense red-coloured light rays in the…

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People visit the mausoleum of Christopher Columbus in the cathedral of Seville, Spain, October 11, 2024. | Photo Credit: Marcelo del Pozo/Reuters The 15th-century explorer Christopher Columbus was a Sephardic Jew from Western Europe, Spanish scientists said on Saturday, after using DNA analysis to tackle a centuries-old mystery. Several countries have argued over the origins…

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The method is named for a casino in Monaco, where Polish physicist Stanislaw Ulam was inspired by the way his uncle gambled to come up with the idea. | Photo Credit: Jonathan Petersson/Unsplash The Monte Carlo method is a type of algorithm that reveals a distribution by randomly sampling its elements again and again. For…

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The Antarctic Peninsula, like many polar regions, is warming faster than the global average, with extreme heat events in Antarctica becoming more common. A study which used satellite data to assess how much the Antarctic Peninsula has been “greening” in response to climate change found that the area of vegetation cover across the Peninsula increased…

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A study by Northwestern University researchers have found that showerheads and toothbrushes are teeming with an extremely diverse collection of viruses — most of which have never been seen before. Although this might sound ominous, the good news is these viruses don’t target people. They target bacteria. The microorganisms collected in the study are bacteriophage,…

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