Science

Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson will travel to the edge of space on Virgin Galactic Holdings’s test flight on July 11, Branson’s space tourism firm said on Thursday, beating out fellow aspiring billionaire astronaut Jeff Bezos. A successful flight by Branson aboard Virgin’s VSS Unity spaceplane would mark a key milestone in a race to usher

Researchers at Cambridge University say that they have used AI to find 200 potential drugs that can treat COVID-19. With the coronavirus pandemic still not over, researchers are working on ways in which to limit the harms caused by COVID, and scientists in the UK said that using a combination of computational biology and machine

Amazon’s billionaire founder Jeff Bezos will be joined by Wally Funk, one of the 13 women who passed NASA’s astronaut training programme in the 1960s, on the first crewed flight into space from his rocket company Blue Origin later this month. Funk, 82, will be the oldest person ever to travel into space, Blue Origin

COVID-19 has turned the world upside down. While vaccination drives in several countries have gained momentum, the threat of a third wave in some countries, including India, looms large. A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have developed a wearable biosensor

Ever wondered what songs on radio broadcasts you would hear if you moved light-years away from the Earth into space? Lightyear.fm website can help answer the question to a certain degree. It shows what music you’d hear, depending on the distance in light-years you were away from the Earth. Once you enter the website —

Astrophysicist have observed the merger of a black hole with a neutron star for the very first time. Approximately 900 million light years away a black hole swallowed a neutron star. Ten days later, another black hole gobbled up its neutron star companion, and the two events caused gravitational waves that finally hit our planet in January

When their two-year-old son Biel started falling over a lot and had difficulty climbing stairs after learning to walk, Jaume Puig and his wife sought medical help to figure out the problem. After visiting several doctors, the toddler was diagnosed with low vision, a condition far more common than blindness that makes daily tasks a

NASA has shared three stunning air-to-air images of a supersonic shock wave interaction, something never seen before. The three pictures feature two T-38 Talons, piercing through the sky. Though shared on Wednesday, the pictures are from March 2019 when the American space agency successfully tested an advanced air-to-air photographic technology in flight, capturing the first-ever

NASA has announced its computational innovations are now available to the public for free download. The software catalogue has over 800 programmes that were originally developed to help explore space. The American space agency feels that by making these software widely accessible, real world problems can be solved. These software are based around aeronautics, autonomous

Researchers at the New Zealand’s University of Otago, in collbaoration with researches from the UK,  have developed a device — the world’s first — to fight global obesity. Dental Slim Control, an intra-oral device, is fitted by a dentist to the upper and lower back of teeth and it restricts a person to a liquid

An international team of researchers has developed a blood test that can detect Alzheimer’s disease (AD) with an accuracy level of over 96 percent. The test has been developed from Chinese patient data. To diagnose a person with AD, doctors until now had primarily relied on cognitive tests. Besides this, brain imaging and lumbar puncture

Researchers at IBM have mathematically proven that there are certain functions restricted classical computers cannot perform but restricted quantum computers can. However, they concede that quantum computers can’t defeat their classical counterparts merely on the basis of a different architecture. Not only is there a need for finding and writing theoretical proofs of the advantages

Don Joyce, a Nokia director working from home at a remote lake cottage in Canada, recently abandoned his painfully slow phone-line Internet in favour of satellite broadband service Starlink, offered by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Starlink, which cost him CAD 600 (roughly Rs. 36,000) for hardware and a lofty CAD 150 (roughly Rs. 9,000) monthly subscription, provides

NASA recently shared a stunning image of interacting galaxy pair IC 1623 captured by the Hubble Space Telescope on its Instagram handle. The galaxy pair is located about 275 million light-years away from the Earth, in the constellation Cetus (The Whale). The space agency titled the image, “Caught in a cosmic bad romance”, and added

A Harvard astrophysics professor has suggested the mysterious interstellar object “Oumuamua” could be linked to the dozens of UAVs reported by US military planes over the years. Oumuamua is considered as the first known interstellar visitor to our solar system. Avi Loeb claimed that Oumuamua, first discovered in 2017, could be a listening device designed

Raheva was only a year old when she died after colliding with a net of power-lines as she was flying through a morning sky from the coastal grasslands of Jakhau towards her natal ground in Naliya, Gujarat. Alfin lived longer, but in melancholy. By the time she matured at the age of three years, her

On April 6, NASA’s Perseverance rover took a historic selfie beside the Ingenuity copter on the Martian surface. It used a camera, called WATSON, at the end of its robotic arm to snap the shot. Surprisingly, when the final image was released by the US space agency, the robotic arm was not visible and it

A highly awaited US intelligence report on dozens of mysterious unidentified flying object sightings said most could not be explained, but did not rule out that some could be alien spacecraft. The unclassified report said researchers could explain only one of 144 UFO sightings by US government personnel and sources between 2004 and 2021, sightings

Bones belonging to a “new type of early human” previously unknown to science have been found in Israel, researchers said Thursday, claiming to have shed new light on human evolution. Excavations in the quarry of a cement plant near the central city of Ramla uncovered prehistoric remains that could not be matched to any known

Billionaire Richard Branson’s spaceship company Virgin Galactic said on Friday it received approval from the US aviation safety regulator to fly people to space, turning up the pressure on rivals in the nascent and expensive space tourism sector. The approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) comes at a critical time for Branson as his space

Alzheimer’s is an irreversible and progressive brain disorder that affects memory and thinking skills, eventually rendering most patients unable to perform everyday tasks. But a leading clinical-stage biotech company has published completed phase II results of AADvac1, its tau vaccine against Alzheimer’s disease, with positive results. ADAMANT, a 24-month randomised, placebo-controlled, trial, was conducted to assess

Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk will list SpaceX’s space Internet venture, Starlink, when its cash flow is reasonably predictable, the billionaire entrepreneur said late on Wednesday. “Going public sooner than that would be very painful,” Musk said in a tweet. “Will do my best to give long-term Tesla shareholders preference.” At least a few

Launching one of the richest individuals on Earth into orbit has proved a leap too far for insurers, who are not ready to price the risk of losing Jeff Bezos or his fellow space travellers. Amazon CEO Bezos, a lifelong space enthusiast, has been vying with Elon Musk and Richard Branson to become the first

The next full Moon, that most people on the planet will be able to watch on June 24 at 2:40pm EDT (June 25 at 12:10am IST) is known by different names in different regions and cultures. Around this time, the Moon appears full for about three days — in this case from the morning of

A large mass of rock and ice avalanche caused the Chamoli disaster in February 2021 in which over 200 people lost their lives in Uttarakhand, a new study that used satellite evidence has confirmed. The avalanche triggered a mud and debris flood, causing massive destruction along its route. On February 7, 2021, a large mass

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now being adopted for automation in various sectors — from diagnosing medical conditions to regulating traffic and help drive vehicles. It is also used for running chatbots for customers to spotting signs of fraud in financial transactions. This new technology is also being adopted to read people’s emotions and to “speak”

Starlink, the satellite Internet unit of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, expects to be able to provide continuous global coverage by around September but will then need to seek regulatory approvals, its president Gwynne Shotwel said on Tuesday. “We’ve successfully deployed 1,800 or so satellites and once all those satellites reach their operational orbit, we will have

Footprints from at least six different species of dinosaur – the very last dinosaurs to walk on UK soil 110 million years ago – have been found in Kent, a new report by researchers has claimed. The discovery of dinosaur footprints by a curator from Hastings Museum and Art Gallery and a scientist from the

Summer Solstice is occurring today — the longest day of the summer season in the northern hemisphere when the Sun is directly over the Tropic of Cancer. This day signals the beginning of the summer season in the northern hemisphere and the start of winter in the southern hemisphere. Through the year two such astronomical

Betelgeuse, once said to be the ninth most luminous star in the sky, started dimming rapidly in December 2019. Even though Betelgeuse was always a “variable” star, meaning its brightness would fluctuate, by February 2020 it had reported a loss of nearly two-thirds of its brightness. This made astronomers wonder if it was soon going