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...
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...
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...
British theoretical physicist Professor Peter Higgs, renowned for predicting mass-giving Higgs’s field in 1964 passed away on 8 April 2024 following a short illness. He was 94.
It took about half a century before existence of fundamental mass-giving Higgs field could...
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...
Homo sapiens or the modern human evolved around 200,000 years ago in East Africa near modern-day Ethiopia. They lived in Africa for a long time. About 55,000 years ago they dispersed to different parts of the world including to...
Radio frequency based deep space communication faces constraints due to low bandwidth and increasing need of high data transmission rates. Laser or optical based system has potential to break the communication constraints. NASA has tested laser communications against extreme...
Total solar eclipse will be observed in North America continent on Monday 8th April 2024. Beginning Mexico, it will move across the United States from Texas to Maine, ending in Canada’s Atlantic coast.
In the USA, while the partial solar...
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...
CERN’s seven decades of scientific journey has been marked by milestones like "discovery of fundamental particles W boson and Z boson responsible for weak nuclear forces", development of world’s most powerful particle accelerator called Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that...
In the last 500 million years, there have been at least five episodes of mass extinctions of life-forms on the Earth when more than three-quarters of the existing species got eliminated. The last such large-scale life extinction occurred due...
A new study indicates that the two iron artefacts (a hollow hemisphere and a bracelet) in the Treasure of Villena were made using extra-terrestrial meteoritic iron. This suggests that the Treasure was produced in the Late Bronze Age before...
The Soil Microbial Fuel Cells (SMFCs) use naturally occurring bacteria in the soil to generate electricity. As a long-term, decentralised source of renewable power, the SMFCs could be perpetually deployed for real-time monitoring of various environmental conditions and can...
Astronomers have detected the oldest (and the most distant) black hole from the early universe which dates from 400 million years after the big bang. Surprisingly, this is about a few million times the mass of Sun. Under the...
On 27 January 2024, an airplane-sized, near-Earth asteroid 2024 BJ will pass Earth at a closest distance of 354,000 Km.
It will come as close as 354,000 Km, about 92% the average lunar distance.
The closest encounter of 2024 BJ with the Earth...
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...
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission has received the go ahead of European Space Agency (ESA). This paves the way for developing the instruments and spacecrafts commencing January 2025. The mission is led by ESA and is a...
Astronomers have recently reported detection of such a compact object of about 2.35 solar masses in the globular cluster NGC 1851 in our home galaxy Milkyway. Because this is at the lower end of “black hole mass-gap", this compact object...
The fungus Penicillium roqueforti is used in the production of blue-veined cheese. The exact mechanism behind the unique blue-green colour of the cheese was not well understood. University of Nottingham researchers have unravelled how the classic blue-green veining is...
Alfred Nobel, the entrepreneur better known for inventing dynamite who made fortunes from explosives and arms business and bequeathed his wealth to institute and endow “prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind”....
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....
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...
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...
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...
