Category: Science

It is known that the Indian population, particularly vegetarians, is  deficient in vitamin B12. The vitamin essential for the formation of blood cells and the functioning of nerve cells is mainly found in animal-derived food. B12 deficiency during pregnancy has been associated with neural tube defects and poor foetal growth, affecting long-term health. In 1993,…

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A simple Kagome lattice. The name comes from the Japanese for “basket” and “eye”, referring to the pattern when woven with bamboo leaves. | Photo Credit: N. Mori Helium is famous for making balloons float, voices squeak, and as a critical resource for MRI machines and aerospace engineering. Helium is expensive and scarce, finding leaks…

Read More “Researchers use sound waves to detect elusive helium gas leaks” »

The stars of the globular cluster NGC 6355, which resides in our Milky Way galaxy’s inner regions are seen in this Hubble Space Telescope image. | Photo Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, E. Noyola, R. – B.R. Sravan The main reason is surface temperature. Stars behave roughly as objects that absorb all incoming radiation and radiate…

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Science Quiz: On medical disasters 1 / 6 | The drug shown here is created by slightly altering the chemical structure of Y. Name Y, whose use led to a tragedy in the 1950s and 1960s. 2 / 6 | On January 27, 1928, 21 children were inoculated with a diphtheria vaccine in Bundaberg, Australia….

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The hydrogen atom is the lightest in the universe and it consists of the simplest nucleus: a single proton. But while helium is the second-lightest element, its nucleus isn’t the second simplest. That distinction belongs to the deuteron, the nucleus of the deuterium atom, which contains one proton and one neutron. (Deuterium is an isotope…

Read More “To make sense of cosmic rays, CERN team tracks a fragile nucleus” »

In a milestone, India and the European Union (EU) have hailed the conclusion of the India-EU Free Trade Agreement (FTA) while launching a ‘Comprehensive Strategic Agenda’ for 2030. Among other measures, the pact moves beyond supply chains to operationalise joint R&D in advanced semiconductor “heterogeneous integration” and chip design. It also formally links the European…

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A kangaroo near White Cliffs, an Outback area in the state of New South Wales, Australia. | Photo Credit: AFP For a long time, biomechanics experts believed that giant, extinct kangaroos were simply too heavy to hop. While the largest modern kangaroos weigh around 90 kg, their prehistoric relatives were much larger and weighed more…

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If there’s a soup of cells and you make them settle down and work together in orderly fashion, you reduce the system’s entropy. | Photo Credit: Bioscience Image Library by Fayette Reynolds Living things dump a lot of heat into their surroundings. The universe is strict about conserving energy. If there’s a soup of cells…

Read More “Life pays universe a ‘heat tax’ to run precise chemical reactions” »

Shruti Kumar (name changed) is a professor at a medical research institute, working on diagnosing a neglected tropical disease that infects almost a million new people every year. Prof. Kumar said that with the increasing number of requests by scientific publishers to peer review research manuscripts in recent years, the process takes so much of…

Read More “Reviewer burnout drives AI use yet human oversight remains crucial” »