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Virgin Galactic will organize private passenger trips to the space station for NASA

Richard Branson’s space tourism venture, Virgin Galactic, will start coordinating private astronaut trips to the International Space Station for NASA — a new partnership aimed at increasing commercial use of the space agency’s orbiting outpost. Thanks to a new Space Act Agreement with NASA, Virgin Galactic is tasked with putting together a “new private orbital astronaut readiness program,” for the agency. That means ........

Moon may be much more metallic

The Moon might be more metallic than researchers thought. And that comes from no less a source than NASA. The scientists who operate the Miniature Radio Frequency (Mini-RF) instrument on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft have found evidence about the distribution of iron and titanium oxides in the lunar subsurface which, they say, could aid in drawing a clearer connection between Earth and the Moon. Their ........

The South Pole is warming at three times the global average, study says

The South Pole has been warming at more than three times the global average over the past 30 years, a new study has found. That could have huge implications for the melting of Antarctic ice sheets, marine life in the region and the rising of global sea levels. The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change on Monday, sheds new light on the most remote region on Earth. While scientists have known for years that the outer regions of Antarctica is warming, they previously thought the South Pole, being located deep in its interior, was isolated f........

Forget coronavirus, homoeopathy can’t cure anything. It’s a placebo, at best

A system of alternative medicine, homoeopathy courts deep popularity in India, so much so that many are known to believe that it’s an Indian system. According to the government, it’s the second most popular form of medicine in the country with as much as 10 per cent of the population relying on it. It claims to treat diseases for which allopathy, or Western medicine, currently offers no cure — from diabetes and psoriasis to polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).  Among followers, it is seen a........

Warming temperatures threaten hundreds of fish species the world relies on, study finds

As the planet's oceans and rivers warm, increased heat could pose a grave threat to the fish populations the world depends on by the end of this century. That's the alarming conclusion of a new study published Thursday in the journal Science. Among the species the authors said are at risk are some of the most commercially important species on Earth -- including grocery store staples like Atlantic cod, Alaska pollock and socke........

You Can Spot These 5 Planets Along With the Moon on Sunday Without a Telescope

The universe in itself is perhaps the most magical place. On Sunday, July 19, 2020, one can spot Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn along with the moon in the sky. What is more interesting is the fact that you would not need any equipment to view this. All that you need to do is wake up at least an hour before the sunrise and watch the sky. According to a report published in Cnet, one may also be able to see this sight for a few subsequent days till July 25........

Rare Comet Neowise to be visible in India for 20 days | Check time and dates

A newly discovered comet C/2020 F3, also known as Neowise, which has been spotted from several parts of the world, will now be visible in India. Comet Neowise will be clearly visible in the north-western sky for Indian stargazers from Tuesday onwards, said Deputy Director of Pathani Samanta Planetarium in Odisha. Neowise, the brightest comet visible from the Northern Hemisphere in a quarter-century, can be observed wit........

Covid-19 lockdown cleared up the air, but harmful ozone levels increased. Here’s why

Around the world, Covid-19 lockdowns cleaned up the air as a plethora of economic activities were brought to a standstill. However, new research shows that while NO2 and PM2.5 levels plummeted during this period, pollution from ozone shot up. On Wednesday, the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) said since the starting of the national lockdown on March 25, pollution from ozone in 22 mega and metropolitan cities in India “increased and even breached standards i........

Explained: What are air shields that may protect passengers from infection on board flights?

A Seattle-based company Teague has come up with a device called an air shield that can fit on to existing air vents inside an airplane cabin, thereby reducing the risk of COVID-19 spreading inflight by regulating the air flows. As lockdowns are being lifted, international air travel is expected to resume slowly. In India, while domestic flights resumed on May 25, international flights will remain suspended till June 30. “Transmission of infection may occur between passengers who are seated in the........

Astronomers unveil the magnetic field of the solar corona

While the world has been dealing with the corona virus pandemic, researchers at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA) have been hard at work studying the solar corona, the outermost atmosphere of the Sun which expands into interplanetary space. This stream of charged particles radiating from the surface of the Sun is called the solar wind and expands to fill the entire solar system. The properties of the solar corona are a consequence of the Sun's complex magnetic field, which is pro........

How Much Color Do We Really See?

An interesting new study from researchers Michael A. Cohen and Jordan Rubenstein suggests that our vision contains less color information than you’d think. Cohen and Rubenstein found that a large proportion of people failed to spot that an image contained major color distortions in their peripheral vision. The participants, all of whom had normal vision, were shown a series of images. Their task was to focus on the center of each picture and look out for a certain feature of the image (either human faces, or i........

The History and Future of Telescopes on the Moon

If you are a Zinio, Nook, Kindle, Apple, or Google Play subscriber, you can enter your website access code to gain subscriber access. Your website access code is located in the upper right corner of the Table of Contents page of your digital edition. Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science news Scientists have long eyed a solution: the farside of the moon. Because it always faces away from Earth, a radio telescope placed on the lunar farside would be almost completely sheltered from Earth-generated radio noise. There, astron........

Medical devices you ingest and forget

Medical devices can be inserted into the human gastrointestinal tract to treat, diagnose or monitor a range of disorders. The problem is you usually have to get them out again, which involves endoscopic surgery. US engineers may have a neat alternative, however. A team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology says it has come up with a way to make devices break down inside the body when exposed to light from an........

Scientist Shares How to Grow 5 Vegetables in a Single Pot & Save 90% Water

The luscious garden, that belongs to Dr Chandrashekhar Biradar, thrives with 50 types of natural fruits, flowers, and vegetables grown through multi-layer farming on his 50 square feet rooftop garden. It’s next to his kitchen. Some of the plants include tomatoes, cherries, Russian Persimmon, brinjals, peas, bananas, beans, chillies, okra, sweet potatoes, eggplant, cabbage, carrots, broccoli, gourds, cucumbers, spinach, salad greens, herbs, onions, peppers, radish........

How to Kill Mosquitoes: What Works and What Doesn't

While you might fantasize about living in a mosquito-free world, eradicating them would actually be disastrous for the environment. Adult mosquitoes are food for other insects, birds, and bats, while larval mosquitoes support aquatic ecosystems. The best we can hope for is to limit their ability to transmit disease, repel them, and kill them within the confines of our yards and homes.........

Living With Being Dead

Glancing around the courtyard of the walled-off National Institute of Neurology and Neurosurgery, you might think this place is filled with them. Two dozen patients chew and pick at their lunches of yellow chicken legs and bread rolls, while others slump listlessly around a courtyard. Some are catatonic. Blank. Others are simply bodies in beds, slumbering beneath the sheets, unconscious in the afternoon. One woman with flared nostrils presses a bony shoulder into her mattress, cradling her emaciated body. schizophrenia, dementia, psychosis........

Is Time Real? What does this even mean?

Indeed, time could be defined as an emergent quantity of matter structure due to causiation (radiation at speed c) deviating from straight effective line.Not surprisingly that definition could be the same for gravitating/inertial mass/energy.I think something like that fundamentality is described by the holographic emergent gravity. Via the information theory almost invariant mass/curvature has steady info and quantized items cannot be figured out. Only the changing distribution would emit measurable q........

Is the Earth an organism?

The idea that the Earth itself is like a single evolving ‘organism’ was developed in the mid-1970s by the independent English scientist and inventor James Lovelock and the American biologist Lynn Margulis. They dubbed it the ‘Gaia hypothesis’, asserting that the biosphere is an ‘active adaptive control system able to maintain the Earth in homeostasis’. Sometimes they went pretty far with this line of reasoning: Lovelock even ventured that algal mats have evolved so as to control global temperature, while Australia’s Great Barrier Reef might be a ‘partly finished project for an ........

These Are 7 of The Strangest Experiments Humans Have Ever Done in Space

The way things behave in microgravity may seem obvious to us now, after humans have been venturing into space for over 50 years. But we haven't always been certain how space might affect certain things. Like fire. Or planarian worms. Or even plants. It's only by conducting experiments that we can learn the answers to these burning questions. That has led to some pretty fascinating, sometimes upsetting,........

Anesthesia Works on Plants Too, and We Don’t Know Why

Humans have been using anesthesia for almost 175 years, but we’re still not sure how it works. Researchers have come at the problem from dozens of directions and posited many hypotheses, but no one has yet explained the mechanism. Enter the botanists. Who else would think of sealing a Venus flytrap in a glass case, gassing it with ether, then tickling it a bit? A group of researchers decided to di e into the thorny problem of anesthesia by looking at how it affects a thorny plant, Venus flytraps (dioneae muscipula). These small herbs (ye........