Science

Decades after burnishing his reputation as a wealthy daredevil mogul in a series of boating and hot-air balloon expeditions, Richard Branson is poised to promote his burgeoning astro-tourism venture by launching himself to the final frontier. Branson’s Virgin Galactic is due on Sunday to send the company’s passenger rocket plane, the VSS Unity, on its first

A new study of exoplanets — planets beyond our solar system — has revealed that none of them, despite previously thought to be habitable, may have the right Earth-like conditions needed to sustain life. The researchers focussed on understanding the conditions required for oxygen-based photosynthesis that allows complex biospheres found on Earth to flourish. Even

Singapore researchers have developed a smart foam material that allows robots to sense nearby objects, and repairs itself when damaged, just like human skin. Artificially innervated foam, or AiFoam, is a highly elastic polymer created by mixing fluoropolymer with a compound that lowers surface tension. This allows the spongy material to fuse easily into one

As Virgin Galactic finalises plans for founder Richard Branson to join five others on a test flight to the edge of space on July 11, the British billionaire said his wife may be nervous about the launch but he himself wasn’t the least bit afraid. “I’ve been looking forward to this for 17 years,” Branson

Three billionaire entrepreneurs – Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson – are each vying to usher in a new era of private commercial space travel. Here is how their rival ventures compare in the race to open up space travel. Tickets Bezos, Branson, and Musk have been investing billions of dollars in their space

A team of astronomers has discovered a huge cloud of hot, faintly glowing gas in space that is bigger than the Milky Way galaxy. They said that the cosmic gas cloud, the first of its kind, may have stripped from a galaxy. What they found most surprising was that the cloud has remained clumped together

NASA astrophysicists have used computer simulation to demonstrate that tsunami-like structures may form on a large scale, deep into space when gas escapes the gravitational pull of a supermassive black hole. Not just that, researchers added that these supermassive black holes are capable of hosting the largest Tsunami-like structures in the universe.  On Sunday, in an

Sirisha Bandla, an Indian-origin astronaut, will be taking care of the researcher experience on the Unity22 mission, when a Virgin Galactic test flight travels to the edge of space on July 11. Andhra Pradesh-born Bandla will be one of the six space travellers aboard ”VSS Unity” of Virgin Galactic, scheduled to take off to space

Researchers at Cambridge University say that they have used AI to find 200 potential drugs that can treat COVID-19. With the coronavirus pandemic still not over, researchers are working on ways in which to limit the harms caused by COVID, and scientists in the UK said that using a combination of computational biology and machine

Amazon’s billionaire founder Jeff Bezos will be joined by Wally Funk, one of the 13 women who passed NASA’s astronaut training programme in the 1960s, on the first crewed flight into space from his rocket company Blue Origin later this month. Funk, 82, will be the oldest person ever to travel into space, Blue Origin

Ever wondered what songs on radio broadcasts you would hear if you moved light-years away from the Earth into space? Lightyear.fm website can help answer the question to a certain degree. It shows what music you’d hear, depending on the distance in light-years you were away from the Earth. Once you enter the website —

COVID-19 has turned the world upside down. While vaccination drives in several countries have gained momentum, the threat of a third wave in some countries, including India, looms large. A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have developed a wearable biosensor

Astrophysicist have observed the merger of a black hole with a neutron star for the very first time. Approximately 900 million light years away a black hole swallowed a neutron star. Ten days later, another black hole gobbled up its neutron star companion, and the two events caused gravitational waves that finally hit our planet in January

When their two-year-old son Biel started falling over a lot and had difficulty climbing stairs after learning to walk, Jaume Puig and his wife sought medical help to figure out the problem. After visiting several doctors, the toddler was diagnosed with low vision, a condition far more common than blindness that makes daily tasks a

Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson will travel to the edge of space on Virgin Galactic Holdings’s test flight on July 11, Branson’s space tourism firm said on Thursday, beating out fellow aspiring billionaire astronaut Jeff Bezos. A successful flight by Branson aboard Virgin’s VSS Unity spaceplane would mark a key milestone in a race to usher

Researchers at the New Zealand’s University of Otago, in collbaoration with researches from the UK,  have developed a device — the world’s first — to fight global obesity. Dental Slim Control, an intra-oral device, is fitted by a dentist to the upper and lower back of teeth and it restricts a person to a liquid

Researchers at IBM have mathematically proven that there are certain functions restricted classical computers cannot perform but restricted quantum computers can. However, they concede that quantum computers can’t defeat their classical counterparts merely on the basis of a different architecture. Not only is there a need for finding and writing theoretical proofs of the advantages

An international team of researchers has developed a blood test that can detect Alzheimer’s disease (AD) with an accuracy level of over 96 percent. The test has been developed from Chinese patient data. To diagnose a person with AD, doctors until now had primarily relied on cognitive tests. Besides this, brain imaging and lumbar puncture

Don Joyce, a Nokia director working from home at a remote lake cottage in Canada, recently abandoned his painfully slow phone-line Internet in favour of satellite broadband service Starlink, offered by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Starlink, which cost him CAD 600 (roughly Rs. 36,000) for hardware and a lofty CAD 150 (roughly Rs. 9,000) monthly subscription, provides

NASA recently shared a stunning image of interacting galaxy pair IC 1623 captured by the Hubble Space Telescope on its Instagram handle. The galaxy pair is located about 275 million light-years away from the Earth, in the constellation Cetus (The Whale). The space agency titled the image, “Caught in a cosmic bad romance”, and added