When you tune in to the radio, the announcer says, “Welcome to 100.1 FM Gold” or “You are listening to Akashvani at 783 AM”. The terms ‘AM’ and ‘FM’ refer to forms of signal modulation — a method at the heart of modern long-distance communications. Signal modulation simplifies the technologies required to send and receive good-quality signals carrying information, like the news and songs on the radio. How do we ‘measure’ waves?
Imagine a vast, quiet lake. The water is as still as a statue. At the centre of the lake is a small island of pebbles. You pick up and drop a pebble into the water. A single wave ripples across the lake, forming a circle that expands in all directions. That is: a single, short disruption triggered the release of a single wave. After the wave passed, the lake became quiet again.
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It lifted off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket today at after 5:23 a.m. EDT (2:54 PM IST) from historic Launch Complex-39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC).
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These findings, published in JAMA Network Open, add to a growing body of evidence that ageing-related or neurodegenerative disease, long thought to originate in the brain, could begin in the gut
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The satellites can help detect, monitor, and predict critical global phenomena across agriculture, oil and gas, mining, environment, and other sectors in up to 50 times richer detail.
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You’re watching Chennai Super Kings play Mumbai Indians at the Wankhede. The stands are packed and the atmosphere is electric. In the excitement, a bunch of people in one of the stands starts a Mexican wave. Everyone is eager to participate. At just the right moment, hundreds of people stand up and sit down in unison, giving the wave a full and fervent expression.
The Mexican wave is a type of wave that appears to propagate through a medium when the medium’s constituents are sequentially displaced from and restored to their original positions.
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San Francisco: Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Sunday said that the first uncrewed Starship mission will be launched to the Red Planet in two years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens. Starship is the world's most powerful rocket and will be used to send humans to the Moon and then eventually to Mars.
In a post on X social media platform, the tech billionaire said that “the first Starships to Mars will launch in 2 years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens”. “These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars. If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years,” Musk announced.
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The Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology (CSTT) focuses on preparing standardised scientific and technical terminology in Indian languages.
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Boeing's Starliner spacecraft has left the International Space Station (ISS) and is on its way back to Earth. However, its scheduled return doesn't involve the two astronauts who initially traveled to the ISS in the capsule — Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore — due to ongoing technical issues. The capsule is expected to land in the New Mexico desert after a six-hour flight, marking another chapter in the troubled history of Boeing’s astronaut transport system. Starliner’s Uncrewed Return
On Friday, the Boeing Starliner undocked from the ISS, pushed away by springs, and began its return to Earth. The capsule was supposed to carry Williams and Wilmore back after their mission, but technical malfunctions, including thruster failures and helium leaks, led NASA to deem the return flight too risky for human transport. As a result, Starliner is making its journey back with no astronauts aboard, leaving empty seats and unused blue spacesuits behind.
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The commercial spacewalk was the main focus of the five-day flight financed by Isaacman and Elon Musk’s company, and the culmination of years of development geared toward settling Mars and other planets.
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Explore why space appears dark despite the countless stars in the universe. Learn about the inverse square law of light and the vast distances between stars that cause the darkness of space.
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KOLKATA: A study led by a senior professor of IIT-Kharagpur, in collaboration with international researchers, has dismissed previous claims of a ‘severe ozone hole' in the tropical stratosphere after analysing data of 42 years. The study, titled 'No Severe Ozone Depletion in the Tropical Stratosphere in Recent Decades,' reassures that there is no significant ozone depletion in the tropics and no associated health threat, a statement from IIT Kharagpur said.
Led by Jayanarayanan Kuttippurath from the Centre for Ocean, River, Atmosphere, and Land Sciences (CORAL) at IIT Kharagpur, his team analysed ground-based ozonesonde (instrument to measure ozone levels) and satellite ozone measurements to examine the depletion in the tropics during the past five decades (1980–2022). Their findings contradict earlier research that suggested a potential ozone hole could impact the health of about half of the world's tropical population.
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Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have developed a brain-inspired analog computing platform capable of storing and processing data in an astonishing 16,500 conductance states within a molecular film. Published on September 11 in the journal Nature, this breakthrough represents a step forward over traditional digital computers in which data storage and processing are limited to just two states, the IISc said.
In a press release, the institute said that such a platform could potentially bring complex AI tasks, like training Large Language Models (LLMs), to personal devices like laptops and smartphones, thus taking us closer to democratising the development of AI tools. These developments are currently restricted to resource-heavy data centres, due to a lack of energy-efficient hardware. With silicon electronics nearing saturation, designing brain-inspired accelerators that can work alongside silicon chips to deliver faster, more efficient AI is also becoming crucial.
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The updated crew complement follows NASA's decision to return the agency's Boeing Crew Flight Test uncrewed and launch Crew-9 with two unoccupied seats.
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The Southern Ocean encircling Antarctica is the world’s largest feeding ground for baleen whales – species like humpbacks that filter tiny organisms from seawater for food. In the 20th century, whalers killed roughly 2 million large whales in the Southern Ocean. Some populations, like the Antarctic blue whale, were reduced by more than 99% and have been struggling to recover, even though most nations ended commercial whaling in the mid-1980s.
Today a new threat is emerging: industrial fishing for Antarctic krill – tiny swimming crustaceans, roughly 6 cm long. In a newly published study, colleagues and I found that competition with this burgeoning fishery may impede whales’ recovery.
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First came space tourism. Now comes an even bigger thrill for the monied masses: spacewalking.
The stage is set for the first private spacewalk Thursday. Tech billionaire Jared Isaacman will pop out of the hatch of his orbiting SpaceX capsule, two days after blasting off from Florida on a chartered flight that lifted him and his crew higher than anyone since NASA's moonwalkers. He partnered with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to buy a series of rocket rides and help develop brand new spacesuits.
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On August 24, the Government of India announced the ‘BioE3’ policy to drive innovation in the biotechnology sector by establishing biomanufacturing facilities, bio-AI hubs, and bio-foundries. (‘AI’ stands for artificial intelligence.) A key focus area of the policy is precision therapeutics, which involve developing and administering drugs according to the needs of individual patients. The policy also aims to boost the development of biologics such as gene therapy and cell therapy.
Recent advancements in human-relevant 3D culture models, also known as ‘new approach methods’ (NAMs), have shown promising results in the field of precision therapeutics. These models include 3D spheroids, organoids, bioprinting, and organ-on-chips.
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At the Re-Invest summit scheduled in Gandhinagar next week, all major banks and financial institutions will be giving promissory notes about their proposed loans or funding plans in the sector
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The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Italy, houses a fascinating artifact: a massive cloth shroud that bears the shadowy image of a man who appears to have been crucified. Millions of Christians around the world believe that this shroud – commonly called the Shroud of Turin – is the cloth that was used to bury Jesus after his crucifixion and that the image on the shroud was produced miraculously when he was resurrected.
The evidence, however, tells a different story. Scientists have questioned the validity of the claims about the shroud being a first-century object. Evidence from carbon-14 dating points to the shroud being a creation from the Middle Ages. Skeptics, however, dismiss these tests as flawed. The shroud remains an object of faith, intrigue and controversy that reappears periodically in the public sphere, as it has in recent weeks.
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Across human history, no single animal has had a deeper impact on human societies than the horse. But when and how people domesticated horses has been an ongoing scientific mystery.
Half a million years ago or more, early human ancestors hunted horses with wooden spears, the very first weapons, and used their bones for early tools. During the late Paleolithic era, as far back as 30,000 years ago or more, ancient artists chose wild horses as their muse: Horses are the most commonly depicted animal in Eurasian cave art.
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Hyderabad-based vaccine maker Bharat Biotech and clinical-stage U.S. biotechnology firm Alopexx Inc. will collaborate to co-develop and commercialise anti-microbial vaccine AV0328 in India and other low income and lower middle-income countries.
A proprietary broad-spectrum anti-microbial vaccine candidate of Alopexx, AV0328 is a synthetic vaccine designed to target poly N-acetyl glucosamine (PNAG) found on the surface of a wide range of bacterial, fungal, and parasitic pathogens.
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Have you ever wanted to make a $150,000 gamble? If you’re right, you open a new window to the universe. But if you’re wrong, you’ve just wasted a lot of money and time.
That is exactly what my team did when we pointed the Keck telescope at Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawai’i at what looked like empty space, hoping to reveal the hidden gas that shrouds all galaxies in the universe. There were cheers in the control room when we realised our gamble had paid off.
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This September, during Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month, understanding the cancer’s lesser-known facts — from subtle symptoms to genetic and lifestyle risks — can lead to earlier detection, personalised treatment, and preventive strategies
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Scientists have cracked the mystery of how some cancer cells that ought not to survive could actually take help from their ‘neighbours’ to succeed and form drug-resistant tumours instead.
Drug resistance is one of the world’s major crises of the 21st century. When a pathogen that causes an infection or disease becomes drug-resistant, drugs that could cure these conditions become less effective. Pathogens acquire this ability in the form of certain genetic mutations although some non-genetic factors are also in play.
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The Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology (CSTT), under the aegis of the Union Education Ministry, has launched a unique website which provides technical terms in all 22 official Indian languages.
The web portal ‘shabd.education.gov.in’ aims to be a central repository for all the terminologies prepared for Indian languages. Besides all the glossaries of CSTT, other institutions or agencies having such dictionaries are also able to host their work in digital form on this platform.
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Boeing’s crew transport space capsule, the Starliner, returned to the earth without its two-person crew right after midnight Eastern time on Sept. 7, 2024. Its remotely piloted return marked the end of a fraught test flight to the International Space Station which left two astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams, on the station for months longer than intended after thruster failures led NASA to deem the capsule unsafe to pilot back.
Wilmore and Williams will stay on the International Space Station until February 2025, when they’ll return to the earth on a SpaceX Dragon capsule.
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A daredevil billionaire rocketed back into orbit Tuesday (September 10, 2024), aiming to perform the first private spacewalk and venture farther than anyone since NASA’s Apollo moonshots.
Unlike his previous chartered flight, tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman shared the cost with SpaceX this time around, which included developing and testing brand new spacesuits to see how they’ll hold up in the harsh vacuum.
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As darkness falls, the nocturnal half of the animal kingdom starts its day. Nocturnal species are perfectly adapted to navigate and survive the dark of night that has existed for countless millions of years.
What happens to these creatures when the darkness they call home is transformed by streetlights and other artificial night lighting?
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Indian Institute of Science (IISc) researchers have found that a glitch in protein synthesis could affect tumour growth.
In a new study published in the Journal of Cell Science, Associate Professor at the Department of Biochemistry, Sandeep Eswarappa’s team zeroed in on a gene that codes for a protein called FEM1B.
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New research published in the journal Nature has said that India is responsible for around one-fifth of global plastic emissions of around 9.3 million metric tonnes (Mt) per year.
The rate places India at the top of the emitters’ list, whereas the study places China, generally considered to be the greatest committer, fourth.
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In space missions from the earth to another planetary body, planetary protection is the idea that it’s important to preserve the biospheres of the earth and the body against contamination by ‘alien’ microbial life.
It’s an important principle of interplanetary missions, such as from the earth to the moon or Mars. It stems from the idea that we ought to keep the planetary biosphere ‘pristine’ and from being ‘corrupted’ by influences that may not exist had the space mission not been undertaken.
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On September 9, 1839, English polymath John Herschel took a glass photograph of a 40-foot reflecting telescope. This photograph, which incidentally is a word coined by him, is considered as the earliest remaining photograph on glass plate.
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Two NASA astronauts aboard Boeing’s Starliner will stay on the International Space Station for months because of a faulty propulsion system whose problems included helium leaks. Back on Earth, SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission has been delayed because of helium issues on ground equipment.
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft landed uncrewed in a New Mexico desert late on Friday.
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After months of turmoil over its safety, Boeing’s new astronaut capsule departed the International Space Station without its crew and headed back to Earth.
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After months of turmoil over its safety, Boeing’s new astronaut capsule departed the International Space Station on Friday (September 6, 2024) without its crew and headed back to Earth.
NASA’s two test pilots stayed behind at the space station — their home until next year — as the Starliner capsule undocked 260 miles (420 kilometres) over China, springs gently pushing it away from the orbiting laboratory. The return flight was expected to take six hours, with a nighttime touchdown in the New Mexico desert.
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Nobel laureate, who was the lithium-ion battery pioneer. It is this technology that is used in electric cars and laptops. START THE QUIZ
6 / 1 | Which process is primarily used to produce green hydrogen?
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Why isn’t your body transparent? Some animals such as jellyfish, zebra fish and some glass frogs have see-through bodies. But most mammals, including humans, aren’t transparent.
While the idea of a transparent body might seem odd or even a bit creepy, it could actually be really helpful for doctors. If our bodies were transparent, doctors could easily see inside to diagnose diseases in organs such as the liver, spleen and brain. They wouldn’t need invasive procedures such as biopsies or expensive machines such as CT scanners and MRIs.
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Summer 2020 saw news of COVID-19 outbreaks and subsequent cullings in mink farms across Europe and fears of similar calls for culling in North America.
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Questions: 1. What is the term for a transplantation procedure in which cells or organs are transferred between individuals belonging to different species? If the procedure concludes with, say, a human body hosting some cells from a pig, the human is said to be a chimaera.
2. In November 1895, a German scientist discovered a previously unknown form of radiation and called it _____. He named it so to denote its unknown and then-mysterious character. Fill in the blank.
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Sci-Five | The Hindu Science Quiz: On Whale Sharks 1 / 5 | What is the scientific name of the whale shark? Rhincodon typusCetorhinus maximusMegachasma pelagiosCarcharodon carcharias
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A research team sequenced the genetic material from lung and intestine samples of 461 animals such as minks, rabbits, foxes and raccoon dogs that died from disease across China between 2021 and 2024;
125 viruses including 36 new ones were detected
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Imagine a future where internet connections are not only lightning-fast but also remarkably reliable, even in crowded spaces. This vision is rapidly approaching reality, thanks to new research on terahertz communications technologies. These innovations are set to transform wireless communication, particularly as communications technology advances toward the next generation of networks, 6G.
I’m an engineer who focuses on photonics, the study of how light and other electromagnetic waves are generated and detected. In this research, my colleagues and I have developed a silicon topological beamformer chip. Topological refers to physical features in the silicon that help steer terahertz waves, and beamformer refers to the purpose of the chip: forming terahertz waves into directed beams.
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All these animals and plants have a common name because of the way they look! Just fill in the blanks with what you think they look like. The number in the brackets is the number of letters of the word. Good luck!
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Underwater avalanches are powerful natural events that happen all the time under the surface of the ocean. They are impossible to see and extremely difficult to measure, which means we know little about how they work.
Yet these phenomena pose a hazard to our global communication networks. The proliferation of the internet has required an ever-expanding network of fibre-optic seabed cables, which carry practically all global internet traffic.
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The Tibetan Plateau, often dubbed the “Roof of the World,” is a colossal expanse of land that towers over much of Asia. Its average altitude of over 4,500 metres (14,764 feet) is enough to make even the most seasoned mountaineer gasp. But what about aeroplanes? Why do these magnificent machines, capable of soaring through the clouds, avoid this imposing landmass?
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A systematic review into the potential health effects from radio wave exposure has shown mobile phones are not linked to brain cancer. The review was commissioned by the World Health Organization and is published today in the journal Environment International.
Mobile phones are often held against the head during use. And they emit radio waves, a type of non-ionising radiation. These two factors are largely why the idea mobile phones might cause brain cancer emerged in the first place.
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An asteroid lights up the night sky as it burns up in the atmosphere, as seen from Ballesteros, Philippines, September 5, 2024, in this still image obtained from social media video | Photo Credit: Via Reuters
A small asteroid discovered on Wednesday (September 4, 2024) harmlessly burned up in Earth's atmosphere the same day, NASA said.
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Boeing will attempt to return its problem-plagued capsule from the International Space Station later this week — with empty seats.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said on Wednesday (September 4, 2024) that everything is on track for the Starliner capsule to undock from the space station Friday evening. The fully automated capsule will aim for a touchdown in New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range six hours later.
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“Most people are scared of them. Why would you want to look at something that’s scaly and has a creepy crawl?” Levi Storks, assistant professor at University of Detroit, asked this with a chuckle. Yet that’s exactly what got him interested in lizards when he was a child. He would catch them, pet them, and spend hours observing them.
Now, as an evolutionary biologist, Dr. Storks studies reptiles like lizards in a bid to bridge a research gap: we don’t have a complete picture of how brains and the behaviour of their animals are linked.
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Sleep guidelines recommend no screen use in the hour or two before bed. But we found screen time in the two hours before bed had little impact on young people’s sleep. Instead, it was screen time once in bed that caused problems
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A researcher holds a fragment of meteorite during a press conference where researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand, Nelson Mandela University and Rhodes University explain the entry of a meteorite into Earth’s atmosphere over South Africa last week, in Gqeberha, South Africa, September 3, 2024. | Photo Credit: Reuters
South African scientists on Tuesday (August 3, 2024) unveiled a fragment of what they described as a motorcycle-sized meteorite that was discovered in a town in the country's Eastern Cape province last month.
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