Science

An uncrewed Chinese spacecraft successfully landed on the surface of Mars on Saturday, state news agency Xinhua reported, making China the second space-faring nation after the United States to land on the Red Planet. The Tianwen-1 spacecraft landed on a site on a vast plain known as Utopia Planitia, “leaving a Chinese footprint on Mars

The biodiversity we see around us is a product of millions of years of evolution on the earth. To understand how animals and plants have evolved or come to exist on this planet, one can make use of the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecules that are present in cells of most living organisms. DNA provides biological

China’s “Zhurong” rover, part of its ambitious space programme to send a probe to Mars, is set to attempt the challenging landing on the Red Planet in the next five days, Beijing’s space agency said Friday. The tricky touchdown, if successful, would come a few months behind America’s latest probe to Mars, as Beijing presses

Japanese billionaire entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant Yozo Hirano will be the next tourists to travel to the International Space Station (ISS), Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said Thursday. Maezawa and Hirano will travel aboard a Russian “Soyuz MS-20 spacecraft that is scheduled for launch on December 8, 2021 from the Baikonur cosmodrome” in Kazakhstan,

A team of researchers at Stanford University have, for the first time, decoded brain activity related to writing by hand. To further explore this, the researchers collaborated with a participant with paralysis who had sensors implanted in his brain. The team then used an algorithm that identified the letters the participant imagined and attempted to

NASA’s Voyager 1 probe has picked up an uncanny humming sound coming from space. NASA launched the Voyager 1 space probe 44 years ago and today it is the most distant human-made object from Earth, after exiting our solar system nine years ago. Since then, it has been exploring the near-emptiness of interstellar space and

NASA has shared an image of asteroid Bennu captured from its Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft, which is now slated for return to Earth in 2023. In the Instagram post, the space agency wrote, “Stop! 4.5-billion-year-old steroid crossing! You’re looking at a real image of asteroid Bennu captured from @NASASolarSystem’s

A team of researchers at Canada’s McGill University has succeeded in developing a new method to create brain implants that are as soft as the brain tissue itself. The researchers used silicon and sugar to create delicate silicone implants, the softest brain implant to the day, as thin as sewing thread (nearly 0.2 mm). Its

The US space probe OSIRIS-REx on Monday left the orbit of the asteroid Bennu, from which it collected dust samples last year, to begin its long journey back to Earth. The probe still has a vast distance to cover before it lands in the Utah desert on September 24, 2023.  OSIRIS-REx is “now moving away

Ever wondered what happens to a selfie you upload on a social media site? Activists and researchers have long warned about data privacy and said that photographs uploaded on the Internet may be used to train artificial intelligence (AI) powered facial recognition tools. These AI-enabled tools (such as Clearview, AWS Rekognition, Microsoft Azure, and Face++)

Many recent studies have claimed that technology can do more harm than good for children and the time they spend with gadgets is somehow linked to deteriorating mental health. But a new study says that there is little correlation between the use of technology and mental health problems in adolescents. It also throws into question

A new study has revealed that a tiny, carnivorous dinosaur, which had an exceptional low-light vision and whose hearing ability was as good as an owl’s, hunted its prey at night. Measuring only 2 feet, the three-toed dinosaur species named Shuvuuia had large eyes and longer cochlea — the part of the inner ear canal

Remnants of China’s largest rocket launched last week are expected to plunge back through the atmosphere late Saturday or early Sunday, a US federally funded space-focused research and development centre said. China’s foreign ministry said on Friday that most debris from the rocket will be burned up on re-entry and is highly unlikely to cause any

NASA’s Perseverance rover has for the first time captured the low-pitched whirring of the Ingenuity helicopter’s blades as it flies through the rarefied Martian atmosphere. The space agency on Friday released new footage shot by the six-wheeled robot of its rotorcraft companion making its fourth flight on April 30 — this time accompanied by an

Three Indian-American CEOs Sundar Pichai from Google, Punit Renjen from Deloitte, and Shantanu Narayen from Adobe have joined the steering committee of the Global Task Force on Pandemic Response, which is overseeing an unprecedented corporate sector initiative to help India successfully fight COVID19. The names of the three Indian-American CEOs were added to the list

The US Department of Defense (DoD) announced on May 3 that it is launching a formal evaluation into the Pentagon’s actions on what the military calls Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). The office of the DoD inspector general issued a memo a few days ago, announcing the plan and stated that it would audit how the