Picture a space rock smashing into the moon. It sends splinters of moon rock flying into the dark void of space. What would that spectacle look like? Scientists used the ATLAS telescope in Rio Hurtado, Chile, to discover asteroid 2024 YR4 in December 2024 as a new entrant in the asteroid databases — and it … Read more
Yeast colonies being grown on an agar plate. | Photo Credit: Rainis Venta (CC BY-SA) Researchers at Emory University and the University of Texas Health Science Centre, both in the US, have found that a class of mutations that leads to serious developmental disabilities in human babies has similar effects in budding yeast, a simpler … Read more
The origins of human music are obscure because of the many contexts in which it could have arisen and for a variety of purposes. Archaeologists have found musical instruments among the remains of Egyptian and Indus civilisation sites as well as in similar settlements around the world since the dawn of prehistory. Some theories also … Read more
Venera-4 model at the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, similar to the reentering spacecraft Kosmos 482. It was part of a series of missions bound for Venus, but never made it out of Earth’s orbit due to a rocket failure. Photo: https://blogs.esa.int/ A Soviet-era spacecraft plunged to Earth on Saturday (May 10, 2025), more than a … Read more
An artist’s conception of a magnetar in a star cluster. | Photo Credit: ESO/L. Calçada In a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of researchers led by Anirudh Patel of Columbia University has reported that the universe may have another way to produce the precious element gold — which scientists have … Read more
Bunsen, the burner German chemist Robert Bunsen was born on March 30, 1811 in Gottingen. His father taught modern languages at the University of Gottingen and Bunsen too went on to earn his doctorate there. Before he returned to this place as a lecturer, he travelled across Europe for three years. He also taught at … Read more
Asian cultivated rice (Oryza sativa L.) is one of the most important food crops in the world. Representative image. | Photo Credit: Sandy Ravaloniaina/Unsplash Scientists have assembled a first of its kind ‘pangenome’, a kind of reference genome, by stitching together key parts of genomes from 144 varieties of wild and cultivated varieties of rice … Read more
Climate-driven food shortage and undernourishment could affect the composition of the human gut microbiota, exacerbating the effects of climate change on human health, according to a new review article published in The Lancet Planetary Health. The article comes on the heels of a growing number of studies that highlight the key role food and nutrition … Read more
In 2016, when Juan Diego Ibáñez-Álamo at the University of Granada in Spain met Kaspar Delhey, an expert in bird coloration at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, a new collaboration was born. “He suggested we study whether urbanisation is associated with differences in bird coloration,” Delhey said. Many studies have investigated how urban … Read more
ISRO Chairman V. Narayanan addresses a press conference on updates on the Gaganyaan Programme, at the National Media Centre in New Delhi on May 6, 2025. | Photo Credit: ANI The launch of India’s maiden human space flight — Gaganyaan — has been pushed to the first quarter of 2027, nearly five years later than … Read more