Category: Science

India’s drug regulator just approved the country’s first dengue vaccine, Qdenga. It is designed and claimed to protect against the four serotypes of the dengue-causing virus, called DENV-1 to DENV-4. Young children as well as adults (aged 4-60 years), irrespective of whether they have had dengue before, may be vaccinated with Qdenga. More than 40…

Read More “India’s first dengue vaccine arrives with a crucial safety caveat” »

A view of Abi Srinjamo Bao from below. | Photo Credit: Devers 2015 Who were the people who left their dead in a cave 4,000 m above a Ladakhi village — and why does almost nobody alive carry their particular mix of ancestries? A study published in Science Advances on Friday has reported genome-wide data…

Read More “Half Tibetan, half North Indian: a lost Himalayan people emerges from a Ladakh cave” »

A view of the mission control centre at the ISRO Telemetry Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC), Peenya campus, through a glass window. | Photo Credit: MURALI KUMAR K./The Hindu The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is being poisoned by politicisation. With each passing year of late, it is a darker shadow of its once-formidable self,…

Read More “The state is draining ISRO’s hard-won excellence” »

There have been a number of news reports recently about a startup in Bengaluru called Vimag Labs that has reportedly replaced rare-earth magnets in motors with so-called “virtual” magnets. One such report quoted Manish Seth, the start-up’s CEO, as saying: “We remove permanent magnets, replace them with copper coils, and then through software, we generate…

Read More “‘Virtual magnet’ claims reveal why EVs need their rare-earth magnets” »

A black-throated parrotbill, an inhabitant of the eastern Himalayas | Photo Credit: Dibyendu Ash As spring approaches in the hyper-biodiverse Himalayas, birds that are accustomed to cooler climes migrate to the north. This is driven not just by temperature or precipitation alone, but also the availability of prey: arthropods (insects and spiders). But climate change…

Read More “science for all newsletter Himalaya’s birds grapple with a seasonal drop in insect prey” »

Conventional bombs explode on or near a target surface, with the explosion and fragments, e.g. shrapnel, rendering the bomb’s damage. But when a target is buried deep under a mountain, the soil and rock mass surrounding it can absorb enough of the blast’s energy to keep the target from being damaged too much. This is…

Read More “Will Trump’s bunker buster bombs punch through Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain?” »

The view that artificial intelligence (AI) can pose an existential threat to humankind using technologies like nuclear weapons has been around for some years now. Last year, after examining such threats and risks, one study from the Rand Corporation, a global policy think-tank, argued that such risks could not be ruled out. The study also…

Read More “Convergent perils: luminaries demand human ethics not be outsourced to AI” »