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A parakeet at Vedanthangal bird sanctuary, Tamil Nadu, 2014. | Photo Credit: Karthik Easvur (CC BY-SA) A team of scientists has, for the first time in India, identified and genetically characterised a virus that often causes rapid death in captive psittacine birds, raising concerns about the health of exotic pets and conservation of threatened parrot…
Read More “Deadly bird virus PaBV-4 identified for first time in India” »
The team led by Professor Debasish Das of the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering found that cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, can be used to absorb lead from contaminated water. Image for representation only. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto GUWAHATI A team of scientists from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IITG) have developed a biological…
Read More “IIT Guwahati team finds blue-green algae can remove lead from water” »
A researcher shows a bird’s nest containing fragments of fibre-optic cable collected near the front line during Russia’s war against Ukraine, in Kyiv. | Photo Credit: Reuters cienceA bird’s nest found near Ukraine’s front line has caught the attention of researchers, not because of the bird that built it but because of what it was…
Read More “Military technology’s environmental impact: A bird’s nest made of fibre-optic cable” »
Ask Indrakshi Raychowdhury what a quantum computer is bad at, and she points to arithmetic. “If you try to add two numbers, a classical calculator does it easily, whereas doing it on a quantum computer is incredibly difficult,” she said in a conversation with The Hindu. “But simulating a highly complex, interacting quantum system (where…
Read More “Indian lab designs quantum algorithm to beat classical computers” »
In a paper published in the Journal of Statistical Physics in 1980, the American physicist Paul Benioff described what is now called the quantum Turing machine: a model of a computer that operated according to the laws of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour of matter and light…
Read More “The quantum computing age will only begin when we silence the noise” »
Pesticide residues do not arrive as a single dose. They arrive in a vegetable, a glass of water, and the air of a home, often on the same day, and none of India’s three major monitoring systems is built to add them up. In 2008, in the Orissa village of Sindhikela, village residents used pesticides…
Mitochondria are responsible for maintaining the cell’s supply of energy. | Photo Credit: Image created with AI Proteins in the cells in our body perform functions of value to the sustenance and growth of organs. There are more than 20 amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins, and the sequence of these amino…
Read More “How the amino acid leucine helps our cells produce energy” »
There’s no doubting that the human species is now the most dominant one on planet Earth. That said, it does not go without saying that we shoulder that dominance responsibly. In fact, there’s growing evidence to the contrary. The debate as to whether it was humans or climate change that led to the extinction of…
Plants need at least around 10 ppm of carbon dioxide in the air to survive. | Photo Credit: Mick Haupt/Unsplash Researchers from the U.S. have estimated how long photosynthetic life will last on the earth. As the sun ages, it also becomes brighter, eventually emitting a colour too hot for plants to survive. Previous studies…
In chronic kidney disease, the kidneys gradually lose their ability to filter waste from the blood. While diabetes is one of its leading causes, many patients develop the condition because of high blood pressure, autoimmune disorders or other conditions that damage the kidney’s filtering units. Doctors can slow the disease using medicines that lower blood…
Read More “Finerenone helps slow kidney disease in patients without diabetes” »