Bacterial dormancy is survival strategy in response to stressful exposure to antibiotics taken by a patient for treatment. The dormant cells become tolerant to antibiotics and are killed at slower rate and survive sometimes. This is called ‘antibiotic tolerance’...
JAXA, Japan’s space agency has successfully soft landed “Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM)” on lunar surface. This makes Japan fifth country to have lunar soft-landing capability, after the US, the Soviet Union, China and India.
The mission aims to...
Two decades ago, two Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars on 3rd and 24th January 2004, respectively to look for evidence that water once flowed on the surface of the Red Planet. Designed to last just 3...
Tenacity is an important success factor. Anterior mid-cingulate cortex (aMCC) of the brain contributes in being tenacious and has a role in successful aging. Because brain display remarkable plasticity in response to attitudes and life experiences, it may be...
Fast Radio Burst FRB 20220610A, the most powerful radio burst ever observed was detected on 10 June 2022. It had originated from a source that existed 8.5 billion years ago when the universe was just 5 billion years old...
The lunar lander, ‘Peregrine Mission One,’ built by ‘Astrobotic Technology’ under NASA’s ‘Commercial Lunar Payload Services’ (CLPS) initiative was launched into space on 8 January 2024. The spacecraft has since suffered propellant leak. Hence, Peregrine 1 can no longer soft...
UAE’s MBR Space Centre has collaborated with NASA to provide an airlock for the first lunar space station Gateway that will orbit the Moon to support long-term exploration of the Moon under NASA’s Artemis Interplanetary Mission. An Air lock is an...
The solar observatory spacecraft, Aditya-L1 was successfully inserted in Halo-Orbit about 1.5 million km away from earth on 6th January 2024. It was launched on 2nd September 2023 by ISRO.
The Halo orbit is a periodic, three-dimensional orbit at Lagrangian point L1 involving Sun, Earth...
Stars have a life cycle spanning a few million to trillions of years. They are born, undergo changes with the passage of time and finally meet their end when fuel runs out to become a very dense remanent body....
ISRO has successfully launched the satellite XPoSat which is world’s second ‘X-ray Polarimetry Space Observatory’. This will carry out research in space-based polarisation measurements of X-ray emission from various cosmic sources. Earlier, NASA had sent ‘Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer...
The brine shrimps have evolved to express sodium pumps that exchange 2 Na+ for 1 K+ (instead of the canonical 3Na+ for 2 K+). This adaptation helps Artemia remove proportionally higher amount of sodium to the exterior which enable...
‘Fusion Ignition’ achieved first in December 2022 has been demonstrated another three times to date at National Ignition Facility (NIF) of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). This is a step forward in fusion research and confirms proof-of-concept that controlled nuclear...
The word ‘robot’ evokes images of human-like manmade metallic machine (humanoid) designed and programmed to automatically perform some tasks for us. However, robots (or bots) can be of any shape or size and can be made of any material...
Merger of two black holes has three stages: inspiral, merger and ringdown phases. Characteristic gravitational waves are emitted in each phase. The last ringdown phase is very brief and encode information about properties of final black hole. Reanalysis of data from...
This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded jointly to Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov “for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots.”
Quantum dots are nanoparticles, tiny semiconductor particles, a few nanometres in size between 1.5 and...
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 has been awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter”.
An attosecond is one quintillionth...
Matter is subject to gravitational attraction. Einstein’s general relativity had predicted that antimatter also should fall to Earth in the same way. However, there was no direct experimental evidence so far to show that. ALPHA experiment at CERN is...
NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission, OSIRIS-REx, launched seven years ago in 2016 to near-Earth asteroid Bennu has delivered the asteroid sample that it collected in 2020 to Earth on 24th September 2023. After releasing the asteroid sample into...
The United Kingdom and the European Commission (EC) have reached an agreement on the UK's participation in Horizon Europe (EU's research and innovation) programme and Copernicus (EU's Earth observation) programme. This is in line with the EU-UK Trade and...
Oxygen-28 (28O), the heaviest rare isotope of oxygen has been detected for the first time by Japanese researchers. Unexpectedly it was found to be short-lived and unstable despite meeting the “magic” number criteria of nuclear stability.
Oxygen has many isotopes; all...
Kākāpō parrot (also known as “owl parrot” because of its owl-like facial features) is a critically endangered parrot species native to New Zealand. It is an unusual animal for it is the longest living birds in the world (may...
Between 1958 and 1978, USA and former USSR sent 59 and 58 moon missions respectively. The lunar race between the two ceased in 1978. End of cold war and collapse of former Soviet Union and subsequent emergence of new...
India’s lunar lander Vikram (with rover Pragyan) of Chandrayaan-3 mission has safely soft landed at high latitude lunar surface on south pole along with respective payloads. This is first lunar mission to land on high latitude lunar south pole...
NASA’s mission update on 05th August 2023 said Voyager 2 communications has paused. Communications should resume once the spacecraft’s antenna is realigned with Earth in mid-October 2023.
On 4th August 2023, NASA had reestablished full communications with Voyager 2...
Parthenogenesis is asexual reproduction in which genetic contribution from male is dispensed with. Eggs develop to offspring on their own without being fertilised by a sperm. This is seen in nature in some species of plants, insects, reptiles etc....
