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A Spanish galleon (right, foreground) might carry dozens of animals to provide fresh eggs, milk, and meat for the first few weeks of a voyage. | Photo Credit: Public domain — Prabhakar Jonnalagadda A: To preserve a food item meant to remove moisture, increase acidity and/or to use natural preservatives. Meats and fish would be…
Read More “Before refrigeration, how did seafarers preserve food on long voyages?” »
Researchers have shown a loophole in the no-cloning theorem by creating perfect copies using ideas from information theory. The protocol is illustrated here. | Photo Credit: Image created with Sonnet 4.6 Quantum physics has a rule called the no-cloning theorem that prevents you from making a perfect copy of an unknown quantum state. It has…
Read More “‘Cloning’ hurdle skirted to make perfect copy of quantum state” »
India’s long wait for a dengue vaccine may finally be coming to an end. Takeda’s tetravalent dengue vaccine, TAK-003 (called ‘Qdenga’), recently received clearance from the Subject Expert Committee (SEC) under the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) for use among individuals aged 4 to 60 years. This marks a significant milestone in the country’s…
Read More “Qdenga: a vaccine for dengue but not a silver bullet” »
Scientists have shown that helium atoms can be entangled through their movement. Representative illustration. | Photo Credit: Getty Images Scientists have shown that helium atoms can be entangled through their movement. A team from Australia and the U.S. collided clouds of helium atoms together to create pairs that shared a single quantum state. The achievement…
Throughout human history, the sky symbolised freedom — vast, open, untouched. Today, that no longer holds. The earth’s orbital environment has become crowded, fragile, and vulnerable, threatened by what is today evidently a failure of governance rather than just of engineering. The language of space sustainability has grown familiar in international forums and policy documents….
Read More “Earth’s orbits are filling up because governance hasn’t kept pace” »
Albert Einstein (left) in conversation with J. Robert Oppenheimer. Picture taken in 1949 when Dr. Oppenheimer was director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.A. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives In the late 1930s, in a small corner of Thayyur, Thrissur, a couple had their third girl child, and no…
Vector cartoon stick figure drawing conceptual illustration. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto Mosquitoes annoy almost everyone. And sometimes, you might notice that you are getting far more mosquito bites than your friend sitting right next to you in the same room. It can feel unfair, but let’s clear up a common myth first: it is…
Read More “Why do mosquitoes love some people more than others?” »
Parkinson’s disease affects more than 10 million people worldwide. A patient struggles to perform coordinated movement, requiring conscious effort and attention even for a simple task like buttoning a shirt. Natural movements like walking and turning have to be planned as the person will struggle to start and stop actions. Over time, the person will…
Read More “Newfound brain network ‘SCAN’ implicated in Parkinson’s disease” »
India’s relationship with fragrance is ancient, intimate, and profoundly sophisticated. Long before perfume became a global industry, long before it was bottled, branded, advertised, and sold in department stores, fragrance in India was understood as a lived technology-deeply embedded in medicine, ritual, daily grooming, aesthetics, seasonal rhythms, and even spiritual practice. Scent was never merely…
Read More “Reclaiming India’s fragrance heritage — why a name matters” »
An illustration of the RNA called mRNA. | Photo Credit: Getty Images In a study published in the journal Clean Water on March 28, scientists reported that extracellular RNA (exRNA) from bacteria can persist in disinfected drinking water. They also found that by studying the exRNA, they could figure out what the bacteria were doing…