Science

Techniques to genetically-edit human embryos should not be used until they are proved to be reliable and safe, an international commission said Thursday, in the wake of a scandal over gene-modified babies in China two years ago. Experts from the commission of US National Academy of Medicine, US National Academy of Sciences, and Britain’s Royal Society

Scientists announced Wednesday the discovery of a black hole, the oldest ever detected, that shouldn’t even exist according to the current understanding of cosmic monsters so dense not even light can escape their gravitational pull. Born of a merger between two other black holes, GW190521 weighs in at 142 times the mass of our Sun

As every new parent knows, sleep can go out the window after the arrival of a newborn. That was certainly the case for parents Radhika and Bharath Patil, who seeking relief for their own disrupted sleep patterns, put their electronic engineering backgrounds together to create a “smart crib”. Their crib, powered by artificial intelligence, combines

Have you ever lost something and never found it again? I just sometimes wish that everything should have some sort of a GPS device attached to it so that we know its location always. Might sound pretty impractical but then just imagine, I could have found my favorite jacket that was left behind on a

Elon Musk isn’t content with electric cars, shooting people into orbit, populating Mars and building underground tunnels to solve traffic problems. He also wants to get inside your brain. His startup, Neuralink, wants to one day implant computer chips inside the human brain. The goal is to develop implants that can treat neural disorders —

The decades-old dream of zipping around in the sky as simply as driving on highways may be becoming less illusory. Japan’s SkyDrive, among the myriads of “flying car” projects around the world, has carried out a successful though modest test flight with one person aboard. In a video shown to reporters on Friday, a contraption

Jakob van Zyl, an engineer who held crucial positions at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was involved in numerous space exploration missions over decades, has died. He was 63. Van Zyl, who retired in 2019 after a 33-year career, suffered a heart attack on Monday and died Wednesday at a hospital in Pasadena, California, said

Water covers 70 percent of the Earth’s surface and is crucial to life as we know it, but how it got here has been a longstanding scientific debate. The puzzle was a step closer to being solved Thursday after a French team reported in the journal Science they had identified which space rocks were responsible,

Boeing said on Tuesday it aims to redo its unmanned Starliner crew capsule flight test to the International Space Station (ISS) in December or January, depending on when it completes software and test hardware production development. If the test mission is successful, Boeing and NASA will fly Starliner’s first crewed mission in summer 2021, with

Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has suggested the US electric carmaker may be able to mass produce longer-life batteries with 50 percent more energy density in three to four years. “400 Wh/kg *with* high cycle life, produced in volume (not just a lab) is not far. Probably 3 to 4 years,” Musk tweeted on Monday ahead of

Over one-third of the land area of the globe is grazed by livestock. An increasing portion (1.4 percent per year, totalling 752 million in 2012) of the world’s poor (people living on less than $2, or around Rs. 150 each day) are rearing livestock. A large portion of the global food economy depends on livestock products.

India’s second lunar mission Chandrayaan-2 completed one year in orbit around the moon on Thursday and all instruments are currently performing well and there is adequate onboard fuel to keep it operational for about seven more years, space agency ISRO said. Chandrayaan-2 was launched on July 22, 2019 and inserted into lunar orbit on August 20, exactly one year ago.

The recently announced space sector reforms are not aimed at privatisation of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), its Chairman and Secretary in the Department of Space, K Sivan asserted on Thursday. The space agency also stated that the draft on the proposed space activity bill is almost final and it will soon be placed before

An asteroid the size of an SUV passed 1,830 miles (2,950 kilometers) above Earth, the closest asteroid ever observed passing by our planet, NASA said Tuesday. If it had been on a collision course with Earth, the asteroid, named 2020 QG, would likely not have caused any damage, instead disintegrating in the atmosphere, creating a fireball

On a warm winter afternoon as I unpacked my equipment onto a small wooden boat, one of my curious assistants approached me asking what was the red torch that I was holding. ”It’s not a torch,” I said hastily, checking if my survey sheet was in place. “It is a depth meter… umm… Depth dekhar jonno…

Russell Kirsch, a computer scientist credited with inventing the pixel and scanning the world’s first digital photograph, died August 11 at his home in Portland, Oregon, The Oregonian reported. He was 91. Pixels, the digital dots used to display photos, video and more on phone and computer screens, weren’t an obvious innovation in 1957, when