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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Antarctica is now a harsh land of ice and snow, but has not always been that way. FILE PHOTO: A glacier is seen in Half Moon Bay, Antarctica, February 18, 2018. REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini Earth’s southernmost continent long ago was home to temperate, swampy rainforests teeming with life, scientists said on Wednesday based

Scientists have discovered that the urea present in the human urine could one day be used as a building material to make structures on the Moon. As per new study published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, urea could be used in making concrete for lunar structures. This comes at a time when researchers across

LONDON (Reuters) – Losing your sense of smell and taste may be the best way to tell if you have COVID-19, according to a study of data collected via a symptom tracker app developed by scientists in Britain and the United States to help monitor the coronavirus pandemic. FILE PHOTO: A poster in the window of a pharmacy is

LONDON (Reuters) – Losing your sense of smell and taste may be the best way to tell if you have COVID-19, according to a study of data collected via a symptom tracker app developed by British scientists to help monitor the pandemic caused by the new coronavirus. FILE PHOTO: A poster in the window of a pharmacy is pictured

Researchers in the US and China reported Monday they have developed an artificial intelligence tool that is able to accurately predict which newly infected patients with the novel coronavirus go on to develop severe lung disease. Once deployed, the algorithm could assist doctors in making choices about where to prioritize care in resource-stretched health care

Smartphones are one of the most used gadgets for everyone. Given how many surfaces and body parts a smartphone touches within a day, it also makes a smartphone the most exposed gadget to germs and viruses. Given the spread of the novel coronavirus or the COVID-19 disease, there have been concerns about smartphones being exposed

The United States Space Force launched its first national security mission Thursday, sending an ultra-secure military communication satellite into orbit even as the coronavirus pandemic paralyzes much of the country. The Lockheed Martin Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellite was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 4:18 pm (Friday, 01:48 am IST) aboard an

With the states across India pulling out all stops in the country’s battle against coronavirus, a Chennai-based drone company too is using its technological innovations to tackle the scourge in Chhattisgarh capital Raipur and elsewhere. “Our drones will spray disinfectant on areas specified by the Chhattisgarh government, usually hospital areas, government offices and buildings,” Agnishwar

FILE PHOTO: SpaceX founder and chief engineer Elon Musk attends a post-launch news conference to discuss the SpaceX Crew Dragon astronaut capsule in-flight abort test at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S. January 19, 2020. REUTERS/Steve Nesius (Reuters) – NASA on Friday picked a new space capsule from Elon Musk’s SpaceX to

Amazon Alexa users in the US can now get basic COVID-19 diagnosis from the Amazon virtual assistant, the company has announced in a blog post. Users in the country can now engage Alexa to ask them about their symptoms, travel history, and possible exposure to the virus. Queries like “Alexa, what do I do if

Governments across Europe are turning to technology to track the spread of the coronavirus and monitor people under quarantine, an approach that seeks to learn from Asia but is also putting the region’s privacy rules to the test. From Helsinki to Madrid, applications are being developed for people to report their symptoms to doctors and

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A worm-like creature smaller than a grain of rice that burrowed on the sea floor in search of meals like dead organic matter about 555 million years ago may be the evolutionary forerunner of most animals living today – including people. The primitive worm-like animal Ikaria wariootia that lived 555 million years

BOGOTA (Reuters) – Colombia’s central military hospital, which for decades was inundated with victims of landmines and other casualties of the country’s internal conflict, is being outfitted to battle a new enemy: coronavirus. A Colombian soldier stands outside one of the tents being built in a parking lot of the Military Hospital for patients with

An analysis of coronavirus patients’ voices could yield a “vocal fingerprint” to help detect COVID-19 symptoms in others and prioritise testing and treatment, the Israeli Defence Ministry said on Tuesday. Starting this week, an Israeli startup company working with hospitals and academic institutions will sample voices of confirmed coronavirus patients through a mobile application in

FILE PHOTO: A Gilead Sciences, Inc. office is shown in Foster City, California, U.S. May 1, 2018. REUTERS/Stephen Lam (Reuters) – Gilead Sciences Inc’s experimental drug remdesivir, seen as one of the more promising potential treatments for the coronavirus, on Monday received the orphan drug designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The announcement

FILE PHOTO: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carrying the Crew Dragon astronaut capsule, lifts off on an in-flight abort test , a key milestone before flying humans in 2020 under NASA’s commercial crew program, from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S. January 19, 2020. REUTERS/Joe Skipper (Reuters) – Private rocket company SpaceX

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Scientists in Singapore say they have developed a way to track genetic changes that speeds testing of vaccines against a coronavirus that has killed more than 16,000 people worldwide. FILE PHOTO: The ultrastructural morphology exhibited by the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV), which was identified as the cause of an outbreak of respiratory

NASA has decided to persevere through the COVID-19 pandemic for launching its newest Mars rover that was recently christened as Perseverance. According to Fox News, the space agency has no plans to delay it’s upcoming Mars mission, which is scheduled to be shot towards the red planet on July 17 this year. Allard Beutel, the

As COVID-19 pandemic keeps governments on their toes, NASA and other space agencies have added stringent measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus among astronauts so that they do not carry the deadly virus into space. NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Nikolai Tikhonov and Andrei Babkin are likely to be launched for the International

NASA said it has suspended work on building and testing the rocket and capsule for its Artemis manned mission to the Moon due to the rising number of coronavirus cases in the community. The space agency is shutting down its Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, where the Space Launch System rocket is being built,

A team of US researchers has invented a portable surveillance device powered by machine learning called ‘FluSense’ that can detect coughing and crowd size in real time, analyse the data to directly monitor flu-like illnesses and influenza trends and predict the next pandemic in the making. The ‘FluSense’ creators from University of Massachusetts Amherst said

The government on Friday announced to postpone the nation’s first summit on Artificial Intelligence (AI) that was scheduled to be held in the Capital in October amid the growing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Titled ‘RAISE 2020 (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment 2020),’ the summit on October 5-6 was announced as a global meeting of minds to

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Inside the stout fins of a fish that prowled the shallow waters of an estuary in what is now eastern Canada about 380 million years ago, scientists have found what they call the evolutionary origins of the human hand. FILE PHOTO: An artist’s reconstruction of the extinct fish Elpistostege watsoni, which lived

Google sister company Verily launched a website late on Sunday that invites adults in northern California to answer questions about their recent health and travel that could result in their getting a free coronavirus test. US President Donald Trump had thanked Google on Friday for developing a website that he said would help people determine whether

Three months ago, the idea that most video conferences will happen with at least one child or more making a ruckus in the background would have seemed strange, but coronavirus-related lockdown around the world is turning this kind of scene into the norm now. As COVID-19 continues to spread — with more positive cases and deaths

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australian researchers said on Tuesday they have mapped the immune responses from one of country’s first coronavirus patients, findings that the health minister said were an important step in developing a vaccine and treatment. FILE PHOTO: The ultrastructural morphology exhibited by the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV), which was identified as the cause

The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy on Monday challenged researchers to use artificial intelligence technology to analyse about 29,000 scholarly articles to answer key questions about the coronavirus. The White House office said it had partnered with companies such as Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google to compile the most extensive database of scholarly

(Reuters) – Drugs used for treating arthritis are being tested as treatments for COVID-19, the disease caused by a new coronavirus, as researchers rush to find ways of helping patients and slowing the number of infections. FILE PHOTO: A Sanofi sign outside the French drugmaker’s Paris headquarters, October 30, 2014. REUTERS/Christian Hartmann//File Photo Sanofi and

After two of its employees tested positive for the Novel Coronavirus, NASA has made telework mandatory in two centres, while encouraging other employees to work remotely if they can. The two employees who have tested positive for coronavirus are from Ames Research Center in California and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. NASA made

NASA has selected the first two scientific investigations that will support its upcoming mission to Moon. While one will observe space weather, the other will monitor the Sun’s radiation environment. The two investigations will fly aboard the Gateway, an orbital outpost which will support “Artemis” lunar operations while demonstrating the technologies necessary to conduct a

Amid the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus which has killed nearly 5,000 people in the world, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk appears to be dancing to his own tune, underplaying the danger from the threat time and again. In a memo to SpaceX employees on Friday, Musk said that they were far less

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Valentina Tereshkova was hailed as a hero when she became the first woman in space in 1963. FILE PHOTO: Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman cosmonaut, attends a news conference in Star City outside Moscow, June 7, 2013. REUTERS/Sergei Remezov/File Photo Now 83, she has became a hate figure for some

Even as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s wife tested positive for COVID-19 and the country’s markets posted their biggest one-day loss in history on Thursday, a team of Canadian researchers, including an Indian, said they have isolated the virus behind the global pandemic. The isolation of the virus by researchers from Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital, the

FILE PHOTO: A full-size model of the ExoMars entry, descent and landing module, Schiaparell is seen during a press conference at the European Space Agency (ESA) Headquarters in Darmstadt, Germany October 20, 2016. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach/File Photo MOSCOW/BRUSSELS (Reuters) – A joint Russian-European mission to send a rover to Mars has been postponed by two years

Astronomers have discovered more than 100 new trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), minor planets located in the far reaches of the solar system. For the study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, the researchers used data from Dark Energy Survey (DES), an international collaborative effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, detect thousands of supernovae,

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – On a crag of rock called Brother’s Point on Scotland’s Isle of Skye, scientists have identified two bustling footprint sites that reveal an abundance of dinosaurs that thrived 170 million years ago including an early member of a celebrated group. University of Edinburgh scientists Steve Brusatte and Paige dePolo pose at a

While others worry about economies slipping into recession and markets melting down, Elon Musk’s biggest concern is that his rocket company SpaceX may fail to accomplish its foundational mission — getting to Mars — before he dies. “If we don’t improve our pace of progress, I’m definitely going to be dead before we go to

Supermoon for the month of March is here and it is going to be visible till Wednesday. The current supermoon that will appear from Monday evening, is coinciding with the Holi celebrations in India that will take place on March 10. It is not necessary for March’s supermoon to coincide with Holi as the festival’s

Finding signs of life on Mars has long been an obsession for astrophysicists (and apparently, Elon Musk as well). And even though discovering an intelligent life form on Mars might sound too far-fetched, recent discoveries suggest that life may have existed millennia ago on the red planet at a microbial level. New research further supports the

The astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have managed to successfully cultivate salad crop — red romaine lettuce — that is free of disease-causing microbes and safe to eat, and is at least as nutritious as Earth-grown plants. This feat was achieved despite being grown under lower gravity and more intense radiation than on

Boeing faces 61 safety fixes following last year’s botched test flight of its Starliner crew capsule, NASA said Friday. NASA has also designated December’s aborted space station mission as a serious “high-visibility close call” that could have destroyed the capsule — twice. In releasing the outcome of a joint investigation, NASA said it still has

A recent study has found out that our fundamental measurement of the whole universe could have been wrong all this while. It says that whatever we knew about the chemical measurement of stars could be wrong. And since the whole history of the universe has been tracked using these very stars, our measurement of the

An asteroid with a massive diameter of between 1.8km – 4.1km is set to fly past Earth on April 29. According to the available data, this is going to be the biggest asteroid which will come near Earth this year. To give an idea, the least expected diameter of this space rock is 1.8km which

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Today’s artificial limbs can look very natural, and now an innovative process makes prosthetic hands move more naturally as well. Paul Cederna (foreground), the Robert Oneal Professor of Plastic Surgery at the University of Michigan, shifts his attention as Daniel Lyons, a resident of plastic surgery, stitches up the arm of

US manufacturing and technology group Honeywell said Tuesday it will bring to market “the world’s most powerful quantum computer” aimed at tackling complex scientific and business challenges. The company said it had achieved a breakthrough in quantum computing, which uses subatomic particles to speed up processing, and would launch the new computers within three months.

Kosza, the 2,5 year-old Belgian shepherd and Fuge, the 6 year-old golden retriever are seen before a test at the Ethology Department of the ELTE University in Budapest, Hungary, March 2, 2020. REUTERS/Bernadett Szabo BUDAPEST (Reuters) – Dogs have a type of infrared sensor in the tip of their nose which enables them to detect

The COVID-19 coronavirus (SARS-CoV2) outbreak which began in Wuhan, China earlier this year has now spread across the globe, including two new cases that were confirmed in India on Monday. As of today, there have been more than 89,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus around the world, with more than 3,000 deaths. While there’s no

NASA has selected Elon Musk-run SpaceX to provide launch services for the agency’s Psyche mission that would journey to a unique metal-rich asteroid, also named Psyche, which orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. The Psyche mission currently is targeted to launch in July 2022 on a Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at