Science

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has found the very first person who will fly with the billionaire tycoon to space and return aboard the company’s first crewed spaceflight next month. Bezos, his brother Mark, the bid winner and another person will take the flight in the New Shepherd rocket system that will allow them to enjoy

NASA has shared a fascinating photograph featuring three different galaxies. And with that, the space agency has also explained how these galaxies don’t let any “labels define them”. Confused? Let’s unpack. On June 13, NASA posted a photograph of three galaxies — one right in the centre and the other two spotted on the extreme

Researchers in Singapore say they have found a way to charge gadgets worn by a person by tapping the human body as a medium for wireless power transmission. They say their technique draws power from one source, say a mobile phone kept in the person’s pocket and transfers it to other gadgets worn by the

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced earlier this week that he will be flying to space aboard his space company Blue Origin’s New Shephard vehicle on July 20, accompanied by his brother Mark Bezos. This was supposed to make senior Bezos the first ‘space billionaire’ to actually go into space. But it now seems that another ‘space

A species goes extinct when there are none of its kind left. In other words, extinction is about small numbers, so how does big data help us study extinction? Luckily for us, each individual of a species carries with it signatures of its past, information on how connected/ isolated it is today, and other information

Solar panel “wings” spread out and two camera “eyes” pointing ahead, China’s Mars rover Zhurong struck a birdlike pose as it explored the red planet in photos released by the country’s space agency Friday. Zhurong’s touchdown in May was the first ever successful probe landing by any country on its first Mars mission — a

This year’s first solar eclipse will occur on June 10. It will be an annular or partial solar eclipse, meaning the Moon will not cover the sun entirely and position itself in a way that the outer edges of the sun will be visible from the Earth. This will create a spectacular “ring of fire”

NASA posted a couple breath-taking images of the annular solar eclipse as seen from the United States on its official Instagram handle, calling it a “view of a lifetime” The solar eclipse that occurred on June 10 is the first solar eclipse of this year and was witnessed in its partial form from Ladakh and

Imagine a robot dog accompanying you on your morning walks in the park or on the side of the road. Fascinating, right? And while it’s not really cheap, Chinese company Unitree Robotics’ robo-dog costs just about 3.6 percent of Boston Dynamics’ highly advanced product, Spot. The latest machine from Unitree — Go1 — has captured

In a first for India, Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy, a type of gene therapy for blood cancer treatment, was successfully conducted last Friday at the Bone Marrow Transplant unit at the Advanced Centre for Treatment, Research and Education in Cancer (ACTREC), Tata Memorial Hostpital in Mumbai in collaboration with IIT Bombay. The Central

NASA has released yet another fascinating photograph of two swirling galaxies merging in a galactic system 140 million light-years from the Earth. As these two galaxies become one, shock waves rumble through both of them and trigger waves of new star formation, the American space agency explains. Some of these stars are very large and live

Andromeda Galaxy’s vastness is captured perfectly in a zoom-out video that was shared by World and Science, a Twitter handle that frequently shares interesting stories from the world of science. The video of Andromeda Galaxy, also known as Messier 31 or M31, has left users on the micro-blogging site awestruck. The sharp zoom0out clip shows

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has obtained the first images of Ganymede, Jupiter’s biggest moon, as it flew by the icy moon on Monday. Juno is the only second spacecraft to fly by Ganymede in two decades. NASA has shared two pictures on its Instagram handle, which give us a closer and detailed view of the surface

A team of researchers has developed a new, economically viable system to extract lithium from seawater, while also creating freshwater. The demand for lithium — an extremely crucial element used in batteries that power electric vehicles — has been soaring for quite some time now and its land-based reserves are likely to be exhausted by

Not long ago, bipedal robots that can manage to walk without falling were considered to be the most advanced in the field of robotics. But an acrobatic humanoid robot that researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are working on will give them a run for their money (only if that was possible). The

NASA’s Juno will come within 645 miles (1,038km) of Jupiter’s largest moon Ganymede and gather significant observations. On Monday, June 7, at 1:35pm EDT (11:05pm IST), the flyby will be the closest a spacecraft has come to the solar system’s largest natural satellite since NASA’s Galileo in May 2000. NASA said that besides the striking imagery,

New research has found that it is possible for people to learn click-based echolocation in just 10 weeks. This worked for people at very different ages, and this was shown to be a skill anyone could learn, not just the visually impaired. For the longest time, bats and dolphins were the two commonly cited examples by

A gigantic dinosaur discovered in Australia’s outback has been identified as a new species and recognised as one of the largest to ever roam the Earth, according to palaeontologists. The Australotitan cooperensis, part of the titanosaur family that lived about 100 million years ago, has finally been named and described 15 years after its bones

A team of scientists in Namibia, in southwest Africa, has recorded a phenomenal cosmic explosion, the brightest so far, of gamma radiation from a collapsing star. They said usually these explosions occur when a massive star — five or 10 times the mass of the Sun – abruptly detonates and turns into a black hole.

Jeff Bezos has announced he will be flying to space with his brother on July 20. The former Amazon CEO will be among the travellers on the first passenger flight of Blue Origin. Blue Origin’s reusable suborbital rocket system named New Shepard will take its first astronaut crew to space along with Bezos and his

A team of scientists from Bengaluru’s Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) has developed a device that can emulate the cognitive actions of a human brain, and is more efficient than conventional techniques. The new AI technology enhances computational speed and power consumption efficiency. The team fabricated an artificial synaptic network (ASN), resembling the

A team of scientists at New Culture, a San Francisco-based startup, is set to modernise the art of cheesemaking. The scientists are aiming to launch what they describe as animal-free Mozzarella by late 2023. The creation of “real cow cheese without the cow” involves the fermentation process to create casein, leading to a piece of

A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has invented a fibre with digital capabilities that can sense, store, analyse, and infer activities after it’s sewn into a shirt. Yoel Fink, professor and principal investigator at the Research Laboratory of Electronics and a senior author on the study, said that these fibres

A new study has found that a single mysterious event about 19 million years ago wiped nearly the entire population of sharks. Scientists behind the new research say that studying the shark teeth buried in deep-sea sediment, revealed that the current diversity among sharks is only a tiny remnant of a much larger variety that

Nasa’s 31-year-old Hubble Space Telescope has made another incredible discovery — it has found a “lopsided” spiral galaxy that has been deformed by the gravitational tug of another nearby galaxy. NASA has shared the stunning image of the galaxy called “NGC 2276”, which is located in the constellation Cepheus, about 120 million light-years away from

Whatever or whoever they are, they’re still out there. US intelligence is after them, but its upcoming report won’t deliver any full or final truth about UFOs. The tantalising prospect of top government intel finally weighing in — after decades of conspiracy theories, TV shows, movies and winking jokes by presidents — will instead yield

Researchers at Australia’s Queensland Museum have found a new, adorable frog species in the swampy, lowland forests of New Guinea. Named the “chocolate frog”, it has big, cartoonish eyes and its skin is the colour of milk chocolate. The candy-coloured amphibian is closely related to the green tree frog that’s common in Australia. The researchers

NASA’s long-awaited flagship observatory — the James Webb Space Telescope — is slated for take-off after October this year, as the space agency continues its talks with the European Space Agency (ESA) to fix a final launch date. This comes after their initial announcement in July last year in which the Webb Telescope was due

SpaceX launched thousands of tiny sea creatures to the International Space Station on Thursday, along with a plaque-fighting toothpaste experiment and powerful solar panels. The 7,300-pound (3,300-kilogram) shipment — which also includes fresh lemons, onions, avocados, and cherry tomatoes for the station’s seven astronauts — should arrive Saturday. SpaceX’s Falcon rocket blasted into the hazy

A team of scientists at Columbia University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering has made a major breakthrough and developed a robot that can smile, smirk, raise eyebrows, and mimic the forehead wrinkles of humans. The artificial intelligence-powered robot, named Eva, can emulate human facial expressions to an extent not seen before in the field of robotics.