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People from Bengaluru should not be allowed to complain about their weather turning hot. The other day, as a namma friend called to express disappointment over their daytime temperatures reaching as high as 33 degrees, I wondered in what Awadhi words should I inform her about the pleasant 42 degrees here in Kanpur. The baked earth, the…
Read More “The physics of thermometers, temperatures and cold atoms” »
Scientists identified 9,945 “priority species” that are evolutionarily distinct and globally endangered, including the Ginkgo biloba. | Photo Credit: VDCM image Climate change is not only pushing species to the brink of extinction, it is erasing a vast proportion of the ‘evolutionary history’ of the world’s flowering plants’ — or how these organisms relate to…
Read More “The evolutionary history of flowering plants are threatened with extinction” »
“Cloudy with a chance of rain” — imagine astronomers turning into meteorologists and issuing weather reports like this, but for alien planets. According to a new study published in Science on May 21, scientists were able to use the NASA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to peer closely at an exoplanet nearly 700 lightyears away,…
Read More “Webb telescope captures weather on exoplanet 700 lightyears away” »
The recent success of Ensitrelvir at preventing COVID-19 is a milestone in a drug quest that began with a singular development at the start of the pandemic. In January 2020, the full-length genome sequence of a strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was posted on an online discussion forum for virologists. The sequence revealed that SARS-CoV-2,…
Read More “Anti-COVID drug Ensitrelvir a milestone against future viruses” »
The World Health Organization declared the Bundibugyo ebolavirus (BDBV) outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda to be a public health emergency of international concern on May 17. The outbreak exposes a critical gap in international vaccine preparedness. There is no licensed vaccine yet for the Bundibugyo species of the ebolavirus because…
Read More “New Ebola outbreak shows how market failure delays vaccine research” »
An infographic depicting the earth’s geophysical layers. | Photo Credit: Surachit (CC BY-SA) A: The earth’s outer core is a voluminous liquid layer that lies around 2,800 km beneath the surface. This hot, churning sea is filled with molten iron and nickel. As the outer core moves constantly, it acts like a large generator, creating…
When doctors express scepticism about whole-body scanning, a predictable counter-argument surfaces on social media within hours. Physicians, the theory goes, have a vested interest in keeping you undiagnosed. Healthy patients don’t fill hospital beds. Early detection threatens the treatment economy and the doctor is the last person you should trust to tell you whether to…
Read More “Whole body scans: why investors love them but doctors hate them” »
Domestic dogs have significantly smaller brains than their wolf ancestors. Researchers have long known that dogs’ brains shrank in the past, but when has been a mystery. Some theories also argue that strict aesthetic standards and intensive, selective modern breeding over the last 200 years could have been the cause. In a new study, researchers…
Read More “Dog brains shrank significantly by 5,000 years ago, thanks to humans” »
Normally, empty space appears empty. But at extremely high energy, QED predicts that a sufficiently powerful electromagnetic field can stir up a pair of subatomic particles from the vacuum. | Photo Credit: Image created with ChatGPT 5.2 Matter can become energy. You might have seen this in the film Oppenheimer or in videos of nuclear…
Read More “We’ve seen matter become light. What about the other way?” »
For most of the last two centuries, we have not had to think much about electricity. At the start of this period, we were just beginning to understand what it was. And towards the end, climate change and renewable energy has rendered it a constant thought in our minds. But for many decades in between,…
Read More “How physicists are finding new ways to make electrons act strangely” »