Category: Science

Water was transported deep into the Earth’s surface, the mantle, aiding the creation of magma that triggered volcanoes such as those in the contemporary the Pacific “Ring of Fire” | Photo Credit: Beboy_ltd A recycling process between the Earth’s deep, scorching mantle and its surface water occurred some three billion years ago, generating magma-forming volcanoes…

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A photograper looks out at the view towards the Gobi desert in Taipusi in China’s northern Inner Mongolia region, 2007. Taipusi is the centre of the ‘Green Wall’ project, a buffer that slows the desert’s expansion. | Photo Credit: AFP For half a century, millions of workers have repeated a task across the deserts in…

Read More “China’s ’Great Green Wall’ tames desert growth, but scientists say fight is not over” »

Wildlife ecology in India looks different today than it did a decade ago. Climate change, habitat fragmentation, invasive species, and rapid development are all reshaping ecosystems faster than scholars can document them. Thus, ecologists are interested in how biodiversity has changed as well as how it is likely to change next. Just these questions shaped…

Read More “A new era of Indian ecology looks to its horizons, and to the ground” »

A patient arrives at a hospital showing signs of sepsis, a deadly condition where the immune system attacks its own body after an infection. Sepsis kills 11 million people every year. Doctors must treat it within hours to save lives, but standard blood tests take up to 48 hours for results. Last year, researchers reported…

Read More “How protein biosensors can shrink the timeline of medical emergencies” »

Gaganyaan is India’s maiden crewed space mission, designed to carry Indian astronauts to space and safely return them back to earth. Here, the rocket — Human-rated Launch Vehicle Mark (HLVM) 3 — will inject the orbital module (OM) into the desired orbit. The Gaganyaan astronauts will be onboard the OM. What does the OM contain?…

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Astronomers have spotted a complex sugar called erythrulose in a giant interstellar molecular cloud near the centre of the Milky Way. | Photo Credit: John Fowler/Unsplash A: It is possible, though we don’t yet know for sure. In fact, astronomers recently found a complex sugar in deep space for the first time. Using powerful radio…

Read More “Could the sugar in our bodies have first come from space?” »

Since scientists discovered jumping genes in maize in 1950, they have known that bits of DNA can move around the genome, mostly within the cell nucleus. Scientists have also found evidence of genes having jumped across species. Now, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Germany have reported a remarkable observation: they…

Read More “Why scientists watched a gene hop from a predator into its prey” »