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A waste picker drinks water while working during a heat wave at a garbage dump on the outskirts of Jammu, June 19, 2024. | Photo Credit: AP The natural El Nino cycle, which warps weather worldwide, is both adding to and shaped by a warming world, meteorologists said. A new study calculated that an unusual…
Read More “Scientists change how El Nino is labelled to keep up with temperature spikes” »
The Miracle Berry contains a compound called miraculin that binds to sweet receptors and can make acidic foods like lemon taste sweet for about an hour. Q: You don’t ‘taste’ most of what you call taste. Instead, a large share of the flavour comes from __________ smell, which is aroma moving from the mouth to…
Mathematicians have announced a milestone in the effort to thoroughly verify the solution of the sphere-packing problem — for which the Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska won the Fields Medal in 2022 — using a machine. This version of the problem asks what the best way is to pack a bunch of spheres in eight dimensions….
Read More “A machine has verified the maths that won a Fields Medal: why it matters” »
Science fiction has been a popular genre throughout generations and continues to occupy the hearts of young fans even today. Whether it be the words in a book or the clips of a movie, the genre always has something exciting and unique to showcase. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where a man’s journey to create a…
When Isaac Newton wrote Opticks, published in 1704, he divided the colour spectrum into the now famous VIBGYOR, a set of seven colours (the decision was not, as such, scientific because Newton’s choice was dictated by ‘7’ being a significant number in alchemy.) What Newton observed was a series of hues merging into one another,…
Read More “Blue: the colour that moved kings before poets” »
The story so far: India and Brazil signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on rare earths and critical minerals during President Lula da Silva’s state visit to India on February 21, 2026. The joint statement said the two countries want to work together across the full mineral “value chain” and that the understanding includes exploration,…
Read More “What does the India-Brazil critical minerals MoU mean for the two countries?” »
In 1987, four years after the discovery of HIV as the causative agent of AIDS, scientists reported the first drug effective against the virus, called zidovudine. Zidovudine targeted a viral enzyme called reverse transcriptase, and prevented the virus from completing its life-cycle. However, zidovudine was no magic bullet. It could hold the virus at bay…
Read More “Scientists confirm HIV capsid is a good drug target despite resistance” »
Hand preference reflects how the brain organises movement control | Photo Credit: Kelly Sikkema/Unsplash — Gayatri Chandrashekar A: There’s a neural basis for handedness but it’s not due to any single part of the brain. Hand preference reflects how the brain organises movement control. In most right-handed people, the left hemisphere has stronger control over…
Read More “Why don’t left-handed persons make up half the population?” »
“Scientists have long known that emotional states such as stress and anxiety can influence the intensity of these sensations. While the neural mechanisms linking stress and pain have been studied extensively, the effect of stress on itch has remained poorly understood,” IISc said. File | Photo Credit: The Hindu Researchers at the Indian Institute of…
Read More “IISc researchers find out how the brain suppresses itch during stress” »
A committee that includes K. VijayRaghavan, former Principal Scientific Advisor, and S. Somanath, former Chairman, India Space Research Organisation (ISRO), will probe “systemic issues” underlying the successive failures of ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV). While technical committees probe and submit ‘failure analysis reports’ when mishaps occur, this committee, The Hindu has reliably learnt, will…
Read More “Committee to probe ‘systemic issues’ behind repeated failure of PSLV rocket” »