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With the record warming of 2023-2024, we are getting a clearer picture of what global warming does. The medley of extremes strewn across the planet have covered the gamut from deadly heatwaves to devastating cyclones and floods, from droughts to wildfires. According to some estimates, the world has already crossed the 1.5º C warming threshold….
Read More “Could global warming impede weather and climate forecasting?” »
For representative purposes. | Photo Credit: Getty Images The story so far: According to the ‘Retraction Watch’ database, an Indian scientist at an institute in Lucknow has racked up 45 retractions. It also states that another researcher at a university in Kolkata published 300 scientific papers in a year, which is nearly a paper a…
Read More “What are retractions and why do they matter? | Explained” »
Scientists widely believed volcanic activity on the moon ceased about a billion years ago. A study published in Science on September 5 called this idea into question with evidence suggesting the moon had active volcanoes as recently as 120 million years ago. The moon’s volcanic activity sheds light on how its surface was formed, its…
Read More “Beads on the moon suggest it had volcanoes more recently than thought” »
A view of clouds rolling over a mountain peak in Deomali, Odisha, Augsut 17, 2020. | Photo Credit: Mohan Vamsi Somireddi A: Measurements reveal that, as we go up into the atmosphere, the air temperature decreases with height from the ground up to about 15-20 km in the troposphere. Beyond this, it increases in the…
On September 16, 2023, several seismic stations worldwide detected a bizarre signal. Earthquakes are not rare. In 2023 alone, 1,712 earthquakes of magnitude 5 or more were registered worldwide. But these seismic waves were puzzling; the signatures clearly indicated that earthquakes had not caused them, and the reverberations lasted for a staggering nine days. A…
Read More “Massive Greenland landslide sent seismic waves around earth for nine days” »
Daily Quiz: On sign languages What does this gesture in the Indian Sign Language represent? START THE QUIZ 1 / 6 | How many sign languages currently exist in the world? 2 / 6 | In a particular country’s sign language format, a well-formed question requires a specific eyebrow position. For instance, the eyebrows should…
Silverio, a white rhino calf, pictured next to its mother Hannah, during the calf’s presentation at Buin zoo in Santiago, Chile, on April 7, 2024. | Photo Credit: AFP The rhinoceros population across the world has increased slightly but so have the killings, mostly in South Africa, as poaching fed by huge demand for rhino…
Read More “The number of rhinos is slightly up but poaching has increased too” »
The Covid-19 vaccine, Covaxin, developed by Bharat Biotech. File photograph An open letter written to vaccine manufacturer Bharat Biotech International Ltd and to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), has called Bharat Biotech’s defamation suit filed against the authors of a research paper that studied the long-term effects of Covaxin, “short-sighted and punitive.” The…
Antimicrobial resistance is one of the great crises of the 21st century, and Staphylococcus aureus is an important bacteria species leading this charge. In 2019, for example, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) — a strain that can resist several antibiotics — was responsible for more than 100,000 deaths. Fortunately it is still significantly vulnerable to vancomycin,…
Read More “Vancomycin may not be able to treat MRSA infections for long” »
Representative image. | Photo Credit: Aarn Giri You’re likely to have heard about the butterfly effect and just as likely to have heard the example of a butterfly flapping its wings in one place and causing a tornado thousands of kilometres away. The discovery of the effect has its origins in the work of the…