Science

In an age of constant notifications, endless scrolling and instant entertainment, Leonardo da Vinci’s centuries-old warning about an inactive mind feels surprisingly modern. “Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation… even so does inaction sap the vigour of the mind,” Leonardo wrote in his notebooks. The Renaissance polymath used familiar examples from…

Quote of the Day by Albert Einstein (Representative image) Two people can be told they have no special gift for something and respond in completely different ways. One takes it as a verdict and stops trying. The other decides that gift was never really the point, and keeps going anyway, driven by something that has…

Cloud aerosols on Venus contain far more water than scientists have assumed for decades, alongside comparable amounts of iron sulfate and sulfuric acid. Researchers led by R. Mogul revisited previously uncharacterised data from the Pioneer Venus Large Probe, which descended through the planet’s atmosphere in 1978, and found that the probe’s instruments had unknowingly captured…

In 1849, Italian-born inventor Antonio Meucci began developing an early voice-transmission device that would later be known as the “teletrofono.” Decades of experimentation, financial hardship and a lapsed patent caveat meant that credit for the telephone ultimately went to Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. Meucci’s story, however, did not end there. Nearly 113 years after…

To identify a suitable industry partner, IN-SPACe has issued an expression of interest (EoI) inviting proposals from eligible Indian entities to operate and manage the new launch complex, which is being built primarily for launches involving small rockets. BENGALURU: Space promoter-cum-regulator IN-SPACe has begun the process of handing over the operations and management of the…

Nearly seven miles beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean lies a place so hostile that only a handful of human beings in all of history have ever seen it. Total darkness, near-freezing water, and pressure equivalent to a jet’s weight bearing down on a single postage stamp define this world. According to Guinness World…

Image Credit: X/ @AFP News Agency A tiny nocturnal frog has been discovered in Costa Rica’s coffee-growing region. Researcher Wagner Chaves-Acuña told AFP that the newly identified species lives among coffee plantations and nearby waterways, according to findings from colleagues at the University of Costa Rica and Argentina’s National Council for Scientific and Technical Research….

An insect outbreak has left Siberia’s forests dead while also transforming the region into a tinderbox where wildfires are now spreading beyond human control. The trees burning across Krasnoyarsk this year were, in a lot of cases, already dead. Not from the fire or the drought, but because of a small moth.Dendrolimus sibiricus, the Siberian…

Asteroid Apophis will pass within 32,000 kilometres of Earth’s surface on 13 April 2029, a distance closer than the ring of geostationary satellites that orbit our planet. The flyby, visible to the naked eye across parts of Europe, Africa and Asia, is the closest known approach by an object of this size that scientists have…

For decades, the story of human brain evolution has centred on meat. Increasing consumption of animal protein and fat has long been credited with powering the dramatic growth of the human brain over four million years. According to the new study published in Science, titled ‘A central role for dietary sugars in human evolution’, researchers…

The Moon has absorbed billions of impacts over roughly four billion years, most from meteoroids whose origin, mass and impact velocity remain permanently unknown. The object expected to strike near the Einstein and Bell craters on Wednesday, 5 August, breaks that pattern entirely. According to Nasa, a spent Falcon 9 upper stage from a January…

For ten months, twelve crew members lived and worked at Concordia Station, one of the most remote research outposts on Earth. Cut off from rescue, sunlight and the outside world for much of the year, the team wore sensors that quietly recorded every close encounter between them. Researchers paired this data with regular psychological check-ins…