Three new species discovered in the Himalayas: a new springtail from Sikkim and 2 new ants from Assam.
A visit to a doctor for minor ailments may soon be a thing of the past, with rapid rise in medical technologies. Nowadays, a smartphone can help with disease diagnosis and contacting the relevant specialists from around the world, all from the comfort of one’s home.
Getting stuck in a huge traffic jam is a tragedy, especially if you live in cities like Bengaluru, Mumbai or Delhi. The rising number of vehicles are increasingly adding to this problem, depriving us of our time, money and health. A new research now attempts to reduce traffic pileups in cities by using videos of surveillance cameras. Using Artificial Intelligence and Convolutional Neural Networks, the researcher have built TraCount, a system that can count the number of vehicles in a traffic jam and help authorities manage the congestion in a smart and informed way.
Ever since its emergence as a field of science in the 1980’s, Nanotechnology has seeped into every aspect of our lives. From embedded in toothpaste to materials space shuttles are made of, nanoparticles can be found on earth, on the surface and floating in the atmosphere.
What if a shoe could save your life when you are stuck in a building that is burning down? Though it sounds like a science fiction, the OpenShoe project aims to do exactly that! Built on a novel navigation technology called Inertial Navigation System (INS), researchers have built a minute navigation module that can be plugged into a shoe to track every step to the accuracy of a centimeter! Such foot-mounted systems help in tracking objects in the absence of satellite based navigation and would complement the widely used satellite based navigation systems, say the researchers.
Children often are labelled as ‘gifted’ and ‘talented’ in our education system owing to their academic or extracurricular activities. But what does it mean to say a child is ‘gifted’ and how ‘special’ are they really? Is there a particular age at which they develop the so called ‘giftedness’?
Nanotechnology is the study of objects whose size varies in the range of nanometers--that is a billion times smaller than a meter.
Increasingly, today’s youth of the country are blowing up their childhood in smoke, quite literally! A new study has revealed some shocking reasons behind the addiction to tobacco based products among the youth. The study calls out that parents, especially mothers, play a great role in increasing the probability of their kids getting addicted to tobacco, as much as three times! In spite of the anti-tobacco laws introduced by the government, families play a great role in dissuading the children from using tobacco, claim the researchers.
On 31 May 2017, three space-based observatories – India’s Astrosat, NASA’s Chandra and NASA’s and ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope, along with a ground-based observatory High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), participated in this exciting exercise and have detected a coronal explosion -- an unusually large release of plasma and magnetic field from a star – in Proxima Centauri.
Science education opens up a new world of opportunities today across industry and academia. A career in Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine (STEM) is rewarding for those minds that is inquisitive and wants to give back to the society in many different ways. In a recent conversation, the Research Matters team spoke to Prof. Brian Schmidt, a renowned cosmologist, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics and the Vice Chancellor at the Australian National University on what he thinks about a career in science. Here is a summary of what Prof. Schmidt thinks of science education in today’s world
Ever since Einstein’s theory predicted their existence, Black holes have captivated our imaginations. They are formed when sufficient mass collapses, whether through a supernova explosion or gravitational influence, to form a compact object, with gravity so high that not even light can escape its pull.