Science

What do you do if you’re a scientist carrying out fieldwork in forests, far from routes you can find on Google Maps? On a quiet and cold evening inside the Core zone of Corbett National Park, our vehicle jerking along some unfamiliar path, I was nervous and tense when our driver said, “Sir ji! lagta hai

A spacecraft bound for Mercury swung by Venus on Thursday, using Earth’s neighbour to adjust its course on the way to the solar system’s smallest and innermost planet. Launched almost two years ago, the European-Japanese probe BepiColombo took a black-and-white snapshot of Venus from a distance of 17,000 kilometers (10,560 miles), with some of its

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying a US astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday and successfully reached orbit, live footage broadcast by Russia’s space agency Roscosmos showed. The crew members travelling to the International Space Station (ISS) are Kate Rubins, a NASA microbiologist who in 2016 became

NASA announced on Tuesday that eight countries have signed an international agreement called the Artemis Accords that outlines the principles of future exploration of the Moon and beyond. The treaty paves the way for its founding members, Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, United Arab Emirates, Britain and the United States, to participate in NASA’s Artemis programme, which

The story of Elon Musk’s SpaceX is coming to TV. HBO is reportedly developing a six-episode limited series based on Ashlee Vance’s 2015 best-selling Musk biography “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.” It will tell the story of a team of SpaceX engineers who were picked by Musk to build

Our team mainly works on leopards and other terrestrial mammals in protected areas and other forests of Karnataka. Our research focuses on establishing the baseline population of leopards in both forests and human-dominated landscapes, and further monitoring the same areas periodically to assess changes in the population. We survey an area of interest using camera-traps

Two women scientists won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for creating genetic ‘scissors’ that can rewrite the code of life, contributing to new cancer therapies and holding out the prospect of curing hereditary diseases. Emmanuelle Charpentier, who is French, and American Jennifer Doudna share the SEK 10 million (roughly Rs. 8 crores) prize

Britain’s Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel of Germany and U.S. scientist Andrea Ghez won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discoveries about one of the most exotic phenomena in the universe, the black hole, the award-giving body said on Tuesday. Penrose, professor at the University of Oxford, won half the prize for his work

Elon Musk’s SpaceX won a $149 million (roughly Rs. 1,090 crores) contract to build missile-tracking satellites for the Pentagon, the US Space Development Agency (SDA) said on Monday, in the company’s first government contract to build satellites. SpaceX, known for its reusable rockets and astronaut capsules, is ramping up satellite production for Starlink, a growing constellation of

If you have ever gone bird watching under a dense canopy, you’ve probably strained your ears more than your eyes to find a specific bird. Several species are cryptic and rarely seen or caught on camera, and the best way to find them is by their calls or songs. But, relying on calls and songs

A team of US astrophysicists has produced one of the most precise measurements ever made of the total amount of matter in the Universe, a longtime mystery of the cosmos. The answer, published in The Astrophysical Journal on Monday, is that matter accounts for 31.5 percent, give or take 1.3 percent, of the total amount of

A drone, 7 GoPro cameras, 2 Wi-Fi GoPro trigger remotes, a Canon DSLR, multiple camera lenses, 7 heavy duty tripods, 8 memory cards, 8 walkie-talkies, 7 high capacity power banks, a anemometer, countless charging and data transfer cables, an optically stabilizing binocular, a 4TB external hard drive, all packed in two black military grade pelican

Can a small American aerospace company get to Venus before NASA returns to our superheated planetary neighbour? That’s what Peter Beck, the CEO of Rocket Lab, is hoping as he sets his sights on launching a low-cost probe in 2023. Over the past decade his company has become very good at putting satellites in to

After a four-year journey, NASA’s robotic spacecraft OSIRIS-REx will descend to asteroid Bennu’s boulder-strewn surface on October 20, touching down for a few seconds to collect rock and dust samples, the agency said Thursday. Scientists hope the mission will help deepen our understanding of how planets formed and life began and provide insight on asteroids

An international team of scientists said Monday it had joined forces to combat the spread of anti-Semitism online with the help of artificial intelligence. The project Decoding Anti-Semitism includes discourse analysts, computational linguists and historians who will develop a “highly complex, AI-driven approach to identifying online anti-Semitism,” the Alfred Landecker Foundation, which supports the project,

Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said on Monday improvements to be unveiled at the electric-car maker’s “Battery Day” event would not reach “serious high-volume production” until 2022, knocking its shares lower. Many analysts and industry officials expected Musk to unveil battery improvements at the widely-anticipated event, extending the automaker’s lead over General Motors, Volkswagen