Science

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

Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, is an “ocean world” with a big reservoir of salty water under its frigid surface, scientists said in findings that raise interest in this dwarf planet as a possible outpost for life. Research published on Monday based on data obtained by NASA’s Dawn

Europe’s experiment in using technology to fight coronavirus has achieved some early successes: millions of people have downloaded smartphone tracker apps and hundreds have uploaded the results of positive COVID-19 tests. Yet most European countries so far lack solid evidence that their apps – which identify close contacts via Bluetooth connections with nearby users –

More than 20 countries and territories in Europe have launched or plan smartphone apps that seek to break the chain of coronavirus infection by tracking encounters between people and issuing a warning should one of them test positive. Most countries in the region have opted to use Bluetooth short-range radio to monitor close encounters that

SpaceX’s crewed capsule isn’t called Dragon for nothing. The two NASA astronauts brought back to Earth on Sunday said they felt they were inside the belly of a beast as it careened into the atmosphere at 17,500 mph. “It came alive,” said mission commander Bob Behnkhen at a virtual press conference held Tuesday in Houston,