Science

PC: Harris & Ewing/Wikipedia In 1921, a 14-year-old boy working in an Idaho potato field imagined something almost impossible: sending pictures through the air in the same way radio carried sound. His name was Philo Farnsworth, and the vision he had would eventually lead him towards electronic television. Farnsworth believed pictures could be transmitted as…

In 2021, Nasa grew Hatch chile peppers aboard the International Space Station for the first time, producing edible fruit after 137 days in microgravity. The Plant Habitat-04 experiment was designed to test whether a fruiting crop could survive and produce food in orbit, an important step towards growing fresh produce during future missions to the…

NASA’s Hubble captures Saturn’s mysterious 10-sided atmospheric wave at its south pole (Image: X/ @NASAHubble) Saturn has revealed another strange feature in its atmosphere, and this time it is hiding around the planet’s south pole. New observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have captured a giant, evolving 10-sided atmospheric wave encircling the southern pole of…

High in the mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan, communities are reviving an age-old practice to answer a modern water crisis: they are ‘marrying’ glaciers. As natural glaciers shrink and meltwater becomes less reliable, local people are carrying pieces of ice from existing glaciers to carefully chosen sites, where male and female ice are brought together and buried…

Image Credit: Left/The Wire/Right/CNN A cockroach producing something resembling milk sounds like an unlikely subject for serious scientific research. Yet one species has developed a remarkably unusual way of nourishing its young. The Pacific beetle cockroach, Diploptera punctata, gives birth to live offspring rather than laying eggs, and its developing young feed on a milk-like…

A pair of cotton pants is not usually considered scientific equipment. Yet across Switzerland, thousands of them spent weeks underground as part of an unusual experiment into the condition of the soil beneath people’s feet.More than 1,000 volunteers took part, burying underwear and teabags at sites ranging from private gardens and farmland to grasslands and…

Harvard neuroscientists have kept tiny clusters of human brain cells alive in laboratory dishes for more than five years, setting a new record that could change how researchers study the human brain. The peppercorn-sized brain organoids, each containing more than one million cells from the cerebral cortex, survived for roughly three times as long as…

The Burmese python has become a symbol of two completely different conservation battles. In Florida, wildlife managers search for and remove the giant snake because its introduced population is threatening native wildlife in the Everglades. Thousands of kilometres away in Bangladesh, researchers are putting radio transmitters on the same species to understand where it moves,…

One of the world’s most difficult plastics to recycle could soon have a far more valuable second life. Scientists at Virginia Tech have developed a chemical method that converts polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, into polyalphaolefin, an important material used in high-performance lubricants including engine oil. The approach tackles a longstanding problem with PVC, which is…

Gisat-1A is the programme’s second attempt, and its success finally gives India the capability that Gisat-1 was meant to establish. BENGALURU: When Isro’s GSLV-F17 lifted off from Sriharikota early Friday and successfully placed Gisat-1A or EOS-05 into its intended orbit, the mission did more than add another Earth observation satellite to India’s growing fleet.It ended…