In a first, NASA scientists have spotted a molecule of cyclopropenylidene (C3H2) in the atmosphere of the largest of Saturn’s 62 moons, Titan. Calling this development ‘unexpected’, scientists claim that this is the first time that they have detected this molecule in an atmosphere. They found C3H2 by using a radio telescope observatory in northern
News
Microsoft has announced that Lobe, a machine learning tool which helps people apply deep learning and AI models quickly – without the need of writing code – into tools they are developing, is now available with image classification support. This essentially means that people can import images of the things they want Lobe to recognise,
There may be far more water on the Moon than previously thought, according to two studies published Monday raising the tantalising prospect that astronauts on future space missions could find refreshment, and maybe even fuel, on the lunar surface. The Moon was believed to be bone dry until around a decade ago, when a series of
Samsung Electronics chairman Lee Kun-hee, who transformed the South Korean firm into a global tech titan, died at the age of 78 on Sunday, the company said. Under Lee’s leadership, Samsung rose to become the world’s largest producer of smartphones and memory chips, and the firm’s overall turnover today is equivalent to a fifth of
NASA said Friday that its robotic spacecraft OSIRIS-REx had succeeded in collecting a large sample of particles from the Bennu asteroid this week — but so much that it was leaking. The team in charge of the probe is now working to quickly stow the remaining samples that would eventually be delivered back to Earth
After a four-year journey, NASA’s robotic spacecraft OSIRIS-REx briefly touched down on asteroid Bennu’s boulder-strewn surface on Tuesday to collect rock and dust samples in a precision operation 200 million miles (330 million kilometers) from Earth. The so-called “Touch-And-Go” or TAG manoeuvre was managed by Lockheed Martin Space in Denver, Colorado, where at 6:12 pm (2212
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft crushed rocks and sent rubble flying as it briefly touched an asteroid, a strong indication that samples were collected for return to Earth, officials said Wednesday. Scientists won’t know until next week how much was gathered at asteroid Bennu, they want at least a handful of the cosmic rubble. But close-up pictures and
Microsoft is partnering with billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk-led SpaceX and others as it targets space customers, the software giant said on Tuesday. The partnership with SpaceX Starlink will provide high-speed, low latency satellite broadband for Microsoft’s Azure Modular Datacenter, the company said in a blog post. With the new move, Microsoft aims to “make Azure
What do you do if you’re a scientist carrying out fieldwork in forests, far from routes you can find on Google Maps? On a quiet and cold evening inside the Core zone of Corbett National Park, our vehicle jerking along some unfamiliar path, I was nervous and tense when our driver said, “Sir ji! lagta hai
Toshiba said on Monday it aims to generate $3 billion (roughly Rs. 22,011 crores) in revenue from its advanced cryptographic technology for data protection by 2030, as the Japanese sprawling conglomerate scrambles to find future growth drivers. The cyber security technology, called quantum key distribution (QKD), leverages the nature of quantum physics to provide two
The story of Elon Musk’s SpaceX is coming to TV. HBO is reportedly developing a six-episode limited series based on Ashlee Vance’s 2015 best-selling Musk biography “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.” It will tell the story of a team of SpaceX engineers who were picked by Musk to build
A spacecraft bound for Mercury swung by Venus on Thursday, using Earth’s neighbour to adjust its course on the way to the solar system’s smallest and innermost planet. Launched almost two years ago, the European-Japanese probe BepiColombo took a black-and-white snapshot of Venus from a distance of 17,000 kilometers (10,560 miles), with some of its
A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying a US astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday and successfully reached orbit, live footage broadcast by Russia’s space agency Roscosmos showed. The crew members travelling to the International Space Station (ISS) are Kate Rubins, a NASA microbiologist who in 2016 became
NASA announced on Tuesday that eight countries have signed an international agreement called the Artemis Accords that outlines the principles of future exploration of the Moon and beyond. The treaty paves the way for its founding members, Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, United Arab Emirates, Britain and the United States, to participate in NASA’s Artemis programme, which
Our team mainly works on leopards and other terrestrial mammals in protected areas and other forests of Karnataka. Our research focuses on establishing the baseline population of leopards in both forests and human-dominated landscapes, and further monitoring the same areas periodically to assess changes in the population. We survey an area of interest using camera-traps
Two women scientists won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for creating genetic ‘scissors’ that can rewrite the code of life, contributing to new cancer therapies and holding out the prospect of curing hereditary diseases. Emmanuelle Charpentier, who is French, and American Jennifer Doudna share the SEK 10 million (roughly Rs. 8 crores) prize
Britain’s Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel of Germany and U.S. scientist Andrea Ghez won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discoveries about one of the most exotic phenomena in the universe, the black hole, the award-giving body said on Tuesday. Penrose, professor at the University of Oxford, won half the prize for his work
Elon Musk’s SpaceX won a $149 million (roughly Rs. 1,090 crores) contract to build missile-tracking satellites for the Pentagon, the US Space Development Agency (SDA) said on Monday, in the company’s first government contract to build satellites. SpaceX, known for its reusable rockets and astronaut capsules, is ramping up satellite production for Starlink, a growing constellation of
If you have ever gone bird watching under a dense canopy, you’ve probably strained your ears more than your eyes to find a specific bird. Several species are cryptic and rarely seen or caught on camera, and the best way to find them is by their calls or songs. But, relying on calls and songs
A team of US astrophysicists has produced one of the most precise measurements ever made of the total amount of matter in the Universe, a longtime mystery of the cosmos. The answer, published in The Astrophysical Journal on Monday, is that matter accounts for 31.5 percent, give or take 1.3 percent, of the total amount of
NASA on Monday revealed its latest plan to return astronauts to the Moon in 2024, and estimated the cost of meeting that deadline at $28 billion (roughly Rs. 2,05,787 crores), $16 billion (roughly Rs. 1,17,592 crores) of which would be spent on the lunar landing module. Congress, which faces elections on November 3, will have to sign
A drone, 7 GoPro cameras, 2 Wi-Fi GoPro trigger remotes, a Canon DSLR, multiple camera lenses, 7 heavy duty tripods, 8 memory cards, 8 walkie-talkies, 7 high capacity power banks, a anemometer, countless charging and data transfer cables, an optically stabilizing binocular, a 4TB external hard drive, all packed in two black military grade pelican
Can a small American aerospace company get to Venus before NASA returns to our superheated planetary neighbour? That’s what Peter Beck, the CEO of Rocket Lab, is hoping as he sets his sights on launching a low-cost probe in 2023. Over the past decade his company has become very good at putting satellites in to
After a four-year journey, NASA’s robotic spacecraft OSIRIS-REx will descend to asteroid Bennu’s boulder-strewn surface on October 20, touching down for a few seconds to collect rock and dust samples, the agency said Thursday. Scientists hope the mission will help deepen our understanding of how planets formed and life began and provide insight on asteroids
Apple chief Tim Cook said Monday he views the recent increase in fires, hurricanes and floods as strong proof that climate change is real. The disasters should sway those denying science that shows greenhouse gases are dangerously changing weather patterns, Cook said in a talk streamed during an online event by The Atlantic magazine. Cook
Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said on Monday improvements to be unveiled at the electric-car maker’s “Battery Day” event would not reach “serious high-volume production” until 2022, knocking its shares lower. Many analysts and industry officials expected Musk to unveil battery improvements at the widely-anticipated event, extending the automaker’s lead over General Motors, Volkswagen
An international team of scientists said Monday it had joined forces to combat the spread of anti-Semitism online with the help of artificial intelligence. The project Decoding Anti-Semitism includes discourse analysts, computational linguists and historians who will develop a “highly complex, AI-driven approach to identifying online anti-Semitism,” the Alfred Landecker Foundation, which supports the project,
Astronomers have discovered a planet the size of Jupiter closely orbiting the smouldering remains of a dead star, the first time that an intact exoplanet has been discovered travelling around a white dwarf, according to research published Wednesday. Researchers said the fate of this giant planet, called WD 1586 b, offers a potential vision of
The foggy morning had given way to a brilliant sun. Despite the chill in the air, I could feel sweat starting to bead down my neck as my field assistant and I made our way to a waterhole in the Kanha Tiger Reserve. It was December 2019, and I had just started the fieldwork component
Nearly two thirds of people in leading Western European countries would consider augmenting the human body with technology to improve their lives, mostly to improve health, according to research commissioned by Kaspersky. As humanity journeys further into a technological revolution that its leaders say will change every aspect of our lives, opportunities abound to transform
A hospital in India has deployed a customer-service robot to patrol its wards, connecting coronavirus patients to friends and relatives. Mitra, meaning ‘friend’ in Hindi, is best known for interacting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at an event in 2017. Its piercing eyes are equipped with facial recognition technology to help it recall people it has
Elon Musk is hailed as an innovator and disruptor who went from knowing next to nothing about building cars to running the world’s most valuable automaker in the space of 16 years. But his record shows he is more of a fast learner who forged alliances with firms that had technology Tesla lacked, hired some
Scientists have created first gene-edited livestock that can serve as viable “surrogate sires”, males that produce sperm carrying only the genetic traits of donor animals, an advance that they say could improve food production for a growing global population. The research, published in the journal PNAS, could speed the spread of desirable characteristics in livestock,
The atmosphere of Venus contains traces of phosphine gas, which on Earth can be attributed to living organisms, scientists said on Monday, in a fresh insight into conditions on our nearest planetary neighbour. Conditions on Venus are often described as hellish with daytime temperatures hot enough to melt lead and an atmosphere comprised almost
NASA on Thursday announced it was in the market for Moon rocks, and wants to pay companies to scoop out the dirt, take a photo, and then have it ready for collection by a future mission. The contract doesn’t actually involve getting to the Moon itself, a feat only achieved by the national space agencies
Fulcrum is an app that allows scientists to gather data and maintain entries generated in the field when carrying out their research and it has helped prevent the loss of data to random accidents. In today’s age, mobile applications are very valuable and useful tools for us that enable us to carry out a variety
Dark matter, mysterious invisible stuff that makes up most of the mass of galaxies including our own Milky Way, is confounding scientists again, with new observations of distant galaxies conflicting with the current understanding of its nature. Research published this week revealed an unexpected discrepancy between observations of dark matter concentrations in three massive clusters
Engineers have developed a robot that can detect whether people are wearing a mask to guard against COVID-19 and, if not, politely remind them to put one on. The feature is an upgrade of Pepper, a 120 centimetre (47 inch) high robot with human-like features that is already in operation in some countries welcoming visitors to
Asteroid 2020 QL2 that could be up to 120 meters (394 feet) in diameter is expected to safely fly past Earth on September 14, as per NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). The asteroid is expected to fly past at a speed of nearly 38,620 kmph (24,000 mph) and come within a distance of
Russian research and development enterprise Zvezda has started manufacturing of space suits and personal flight equipment for Indian cosmonauts undergoing training in Russia to be part of India’s first manned space mission Gaganyaan, Glavkosmos said on Monday. Glavkosmos is a subsidiary of Roscosmos with which the Human Spaceflight Center (HSC) of the city-based Indian Space
An experimental reusable spacecraft launched into orbit two days ago by China has successfully returned to a designated site on Sunday, marking a breakthrough that could lead to cheaper round-trips to space, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. The mission had been kept low-key, and state media had yet to publish photographs or video footage
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
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,
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
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 —