Day to Day Science

Astronomy enthusiasts and sky gazers will be able to watch five eclipses this year, but only two of these will be visible in India. The celestial events will start with a total solar eclipse on March 9, which will be partially visible in North East, Ujjain based Jiwaji Observatory's Superintendent Dr Rajendraprakash Gupt told PTI.

> The Zika virus, which has been linked to thousands of babies being born with underdeveloped brains in Brazil, was discovered in a forest in the East African state of Uganda seven decades ago. BBC Africa's Catherine Byaruhanga visited the forest. The Zika forest is not well known in Uganda, and most people will be hard-pushed to tell you where it is. The word itself means overgrown in the local Luganda language.

A computer has helped scientists discover the largest prime number ever with over 22 million digits, breaking the previous record by approximately 5 million digits. A team at the University of Central Missouri, headed by Curtis Cooper also held the old record, they have actually broken the record four times. Mr Cooper and his team are part of The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) collaboration, an effort by a lot of volunteers to find ever larger prime numbers - or, more specifically, a particular class of prime numbers that are called Mersenne, where it is one less than a power of two. Mr Cooper said he was notified by an email sent by the software running on a personal computer (PC) that the prime number, written as 2^74,207,281 - 1, had been found.

There might be a ninth planet in the solar system after all — and it is not Pluto. On Wednesday, two astronomers reported that they had compelling signs of something bigger and farther away — something that would definitely satisfy the current definition of a planet, where Pluto falls short. “We are pretty sure there’s one out there,” said Michael E. Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology.

Beijing, Jan 21 (PTI) Researchers in China have created a special metal oxide transparent glass with long lifetimes that can help protect living cells by absorbing and blocking damaging ultraviolet (UV) rays. The dangers of UV light prompted scientists from the South China University of Technology to search for versatile materials that block UV and can withstand long radiation exposure times without falling apart.

Can not finding signs of life at a place on Earth that closely resembles the area on Red Planet a bad news for those trying to find life on the Martian surface? Yes, say researchers, suggesting that the failure to find active microbes in the coldest Antarctic soils on Earth has implications for search for life on Mars. Jackie Goordial, post-doctoral fellow at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, has spent the past four years looking for signs of active microbial life in permafrost soil taken from University Valley in Antarctica where extremely cold and dry conditions have persisted for over 150,000 years

Washington: NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft marked its 10 years in space Wednesday since it rocketed into the sky above the Florida coastline, beginning its long journey into the history books. Ten years ago on this day, 19 January, 2006, the small probe - weighing barely 1,000 pounds - lifted off from Cape Canaveral at precisely 2 p.m. EST aboard a Lockheed Martin Atlas V launch vehicle specially equipped with a Boeing third stage, making it the most powerful rocket NASA’s science program has used in this century.

This is one sweet piece of news! For the first time ever, a flower is happily blooming in the zero gravity of space. US astronaut Scott Kelly took to Twitter to announce this historic success and has shared incredible pictures of this orange, 13-petalled beauty. While the crew of the ISS has grown edible plants before, such as romaine lettuce and arugula - the zinnias are the first flowering plants to be grown, paving the way to grow crops such as tomatoes.

China has begun preparations for a new lunar mission in 2018 when it plans to send a probe to the dark side of the moon not explored by humans so far, in a bid to create a new landmark in space exploration. The far side of the moon is never visible to Earth because of gravitational forces and has never been explored.

NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter today broke the record to become humanity’s most distant solar-powered emissary, when the spacecraft reached about 793 million kilometres from the Sun. The previous record-holder was the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft, whose orbit peaked out at the 792-million-kilometre mark in October 2012, during its approach to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Washington, Jan 16: US President Barack Obama would present the prestigious National Medal of Science to an Indian-American scientist on January 22 for his outstanding contribution to science. Dr Rakesh K Jain is among 17 scientists, engineers, mathematicians and innovators who will be awarded by Obama at a White House ceremony. Awarded annually, the Medal of Science recognises individuals who have made outstanding contributions to science, engineering, and mathematics.

Nasa's Dawn spacecraft that recently reached its lowest-ever altitude at the dwarf planet Ceres has sent fresh images that show Kupalo Crater, one of the youngest craters on Ceres, in a fascinating light. The crater has bright material exposed on its rim which could be salts and its flat floor likely formed from impact melt and debris.

Green pea” galaxies, which are small, round and green, may shed light on the formation of the early universe, according to a new study. Writing in the journal Nature, a research team says green pea galaxies, which were discovered in 2007, “were likely the reason that the universe heated up about 13 billion years ago.” Several hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, the universe was very hot and dense, which caused matter to become ionized. About 380,000 years later, the universe cooled enough for matter to neutralize, leading to the formation of gas clouds of hydrogen and helium. These grew and eventually collapsed into the first stars and galaxies.

ontinuing the trend, India tops among all the Asian countries as being the birthplace for immigrant engineers and scientists in the US. According to a report the country sends about 950,000 scientists and engineers out of Asia’s total 2.96 million, representing an increase of 85% from 2003. The number of scientists and engineers residing in the US has risen from 21.6 million to 29 million were born in India. The calculations are based from 2003 to 2013 and the 10 year increase also encountered a significant growth in the figure of immigrant scientists and engineers from 3.4 million to 5.2 million.

The spaceship of NASA Juno has broken the previous record of travelling distance set by Rosetta spacecraft of the European Space Agency that was 792 million kilometers and has become humanity’s most distant solar-powered emissary. Launched in 2011, the spacecraft is the opening solar-powered spacecraft designed in such way that it can be operated easily with great distance from the sun. Juno will be pushing the record further from 793 million kilometer mark at reaching the planet Jupiter on 4th July of the year and will serve as the base of a concept for a new, more efficient solar power system. Carrying 9 meter long three solar arrays festooned 18,698 individual solar cells all making the spacecraft to weigh about 4 tonne.

There may be something in H.P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" after all. A massive canyon system and lake have been found running under the ice on the Antarctic continent, according to satellite data. And, if the data is being read correctly, that system runs for over 1,000 kilometres (621 miles) up to depths of 1 kilometre (3,280 feet). Like the explorers in Lovecraft's 1931 novella, which details the fictional discovery of ancient ruins in the Antarctica, a team of researchers is currently working on revealing the full depths of the huge and ancient structure.

I love India! I love its people, its culture, and its vitality. I have many dear friends and colleagues and so have visited regularly over the last three decades. For years, I have felt that India, with its long tradition of excellent science, great scientists and scientific institutions, and rich cultural history that respects learning and excellence, has the potential to become a scientific power.

Three of the five agencies that studied the impact of the odd-even trial on Delhi's air quality suggest that fewer cars on the roads had helped clean the air. This may not be immediately obvious since myriad factors influence pollution levels. TOI explores the play of conditions and elements that makes the air we breathe dirty and dangerous. 1. Source: Leading source of pollution varies with climate

Nobody knows yet whether or not Mars has ever hosted life, but the Red Planet itself looks strangely alive in a newly released NASA photo. Slender, branching troughs snake across a pinkish, pitted swathe of the southern hemisphere of Mars in the image, creating an impression (at least to this observer) of blood vessels forking through flesh

Scientists from the Central Institute for Research on Buffaloes have successfully developed a cloned offspring of a buffalo at Hisar, Haryana. The cloning has been achieved with an aim to conserve and multiply the population of superior buffalo germplasm. The cloned buffalo offspring has been named Cirb Gaurav. What is animal cloning?

Today, remarks the birthday of the famous genius scientist Stephen William Hawking emerging from the fields field of cosmology and theoretical physics. The people all around the world who are passionate about physics and who are not it is next to impossible that they have not heard about him. Renowned for the Hawking radiation, Penrose-Hawking Theorems and the book A Brief History of Time written by him, Hawking has achieved a lot. At his 74th birthday, we salute the wisdom and courage of the brilliant cosmologist.

NASA’s planet-hunting revamped Kepler mission has found more than 100 confirmed planets orbiting other stars. The information about the planets, some of which are very different from what the spacecraft observed during its original mission, was shared by University of Arizona’s Ian Crossfield at a conference of the American Astronomical Society, National Geographic reported.

Albert Einstein’s mass energy equation (E=mc2) is inadequate as it has not been completely studied and is only valid under special conditions, an Indian researcher has claimed in an international paper. Einstein considered just two light waves of equal energy emitted in opposite directions with uniform relative velocity, Ajay Sharma, a Shimla-based researcher who challenged Einstein’s derivation, said on Sunday.

In a bid to grow potatoes in the most inhospitable environments to save millions of lives on the Earth, a team of world-class scientists is set to grow potatoes under the tough Martian conditions.The experiment, led by the International Potato Centre (CIP) in Peru and NASA, is a major step towards building a controlled dome on Mars capable of farming the invaluable crop.

The Nobel Peace Prize 2015 was awarded to National Dialogue Quartet “for its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011”. NATIONAL DIALOGUE QUARTET Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel committee Kaci Kullmann Five said that the Tunisian national dialogue quartet, which is a coalition of civil society organisations, was successful in forming an alternative peaceful political process in 2013 when Tunisia was on the verge of civil war.

New York: An Indian-American professor has devised a new method to characterise dark matter that can help hunt for the mysterious space phenomenon. Sukanya Chakrabarti, assistant professor at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, uses waves in the galactic disk to map the interior structure and mass of galaxies - like seismologists analyse waves to infer properties about the Earth's interior.

New Delhi: Forget Wi-Fi! The new entrant in town is the revolutionary technology Li-Fi that has become the talk of the internet. Imagine downloading your favourite movie while standing under a light bulb in a few seconds! Now with this new technology, you won't have to imagine things but you can actually see them happening in reality. Excited?

The park will be located near Whitefield area, and private industries will be allowed to use it for manufacturing subsystems and components for satellites. ISRO has increased its launch capacity in the past few years, and is planning to launch 12 satellites for observational services, remote sensing and navigation in 2016. So the park will help meet the increasing demand for satellite components and other requirements. Such a facility is very important

India will launch its fifth regional navigation satellite on January 20, a top official of the country's space agency said on Monday. Once launched, it will help in disaster management, vehicle-tracking and fleet management, mapping and geodetic data capture, visual and voice navigation for drivers and others.

Washington: Eta Carinae, the most luminous and massive stellar system ever, is best known for an enormous eruption seen in the mid-19th century that hurled at least 10 times the Sun's mass into space. Now, using archival data from NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes, researchers have found “twins” of superstar Eta Carinae in other galaxies for the first time.

Calling homeopathy and astrology useless and harmful practices, Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan came down heavily on the two, saying real science is far more interesting than “bogus” fields. Pointing out that India is the only country where a constitution asks for promoting scientific temper, the chemistry scientist said India needs a more rational outlook on such practices.

Scientists have solved the mystery of heat loss from the Earth’s crust by discovering a new type of hydrothermal vent system, an advance that may help interpreting the evidence for past global climates accurately. The first discovery of the new type of hydrothermal vent system in a decade helps explain the long observed disconnect between the theoretical rate at which the Earth’s crust is cooling at seafloor spreading ridge flanks and actual observations, researchers said.

Element 113, discovered by Japan-based RIKEN group and led by scientist Kosuke Morita, has become the first element on the periodic table found in Asia. RIKEN is Japan's largest comprehensive research institution renowned for high-quality research in a diverse range of scientific disciplines. For Morita, 2016 will be devoted to thinking of and proposing a formal name for element 113.

Scientists have found a new way to measure the pull of gravity at the surface of a star, an advance that could be key to determining whether any planets orbiting distant stars can harbour life. Knowing the surface gravity of a star is essentially knowing how much you would weigh on that star. If stars had solid surfaces on which you could stand, then your weight would change from star to star, researchers said. The method developed by researchers from University of British Columbia in Canada and University of Vienna in Austria allows scientists to measure surface gravity with an