Order of the National Green Tribunal in the matter of In Re: News Item titled "Nayar river is vanishing - a yatra reveals conservation goes beyond science and policy" appearing in ‘The Down To Earth’ dated 03.06.2025. The original application was registered suo-motu based on the news item titled "Nayar …
PARTICLE accelerators are among the most sophisticated machines built by humankind. The precision which drives these machines, the magnitude of the accelerator facilities and the sophisticated electronics which are the machines' hallmark, are usually the results of a collaboration of many people. The technology also has many spin-offs in areas …
Quark, thought to be the simplest building block of nuclear matter, may contain still smaller building blocks, as suggested by scientists working at Fermilab's huge particle accelerator near Chicago in US. Some revision in the theory given by the team of scientists will be needed as the data is puzzlingly …
Opinions on Jupiter's evolution have undergone a revision, following the data sent by the Galileo probe. Previous measurements had suggested that Jupiter contained about 10 times more oxygen than the sun. The old theory says that young Jupiter, bombarded by comets containing carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, became much richer in …
With funds for mega accelerator projects drying up, particle physicists are increasingly turning their attention heavenwards. A 15-institution collaboration at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in US has proposed a US $100 million gamma ray telescope -Gamma Large Array Space Telescope (GLAST) - to be put into space by AD 2005. …
'THE pie in the sky' is no longer miles too high. The keck Telescope, the world's biggest optical telescope, is helping astronomers achieve what they had always dreamt of doing - probing the spectra of extremely distant, and hence faint, objects in space. The main telescope is operated by a …
MOLECULAR magnetism, which involves designing and synthesising molecules that have properties like long-range magnetic ordering, is one of the most fascinating fields of research in material science. Many materials with this pro~ perty, useful in items like magnetic memory devices, !)ave been synthesised. But all of them suffer from the …
IN THESE days of new materials and corn - posites, it is interesting to note that sci- entists are increasingly turning towards nature in order to understand the origin of mechanical properties of material~. Spider dragline silk is one fibre whose unique properties have, 10l1g beep coveted by material scientists. …
PARTICLE physic::s describes the strong nuclear interactions using the retativistic quantum theory called Quantul;Il Chrom()dynami~~ (QCD),-This theory is very similar to its counterpart in electromagnetism, Quantum Electro- dynamics (QED), but is Temarkably different in many respects. For one, though electric; charges are of two varieties, positive and negative, QCD charges, …
Researchers at the Palomar Observatory, Caltech, USA, have recently reported the coolest brown dwarf with the lowest mass. Brown dwarves are star-like objects which have a mass less than 0.08 times that of the sun and are unable to sustain the thermonuclear reactions in their interiors. Most of their gravitational …
'Glueballs' are hypothetical nuclear particles that have eluded researchers for decades. If at all they exist, they are too short-lived to be observed directly. Now, after solving one million trillion arithmetic problems by running many computers for over two years, scientists at IBM claim to have demonstrated the existence of …
The Bubble Space Telescope team at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has recently released the most detailed pictures or optical images of the universe ever seen. The composite picture shows what scientists call the bewildering assortment of at least 1,500 galaxies in a tiny undistinguished patch of the …
THE plucky American spacecraft Galileo, which went into orbit around Jupiter after successfully delivering a 'suicide probe' in December last year, has gradually begun to unveil the mysteries surrounding the planet's atmosphere. , After a reasonably long wait, scientists at the us National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have now …
PHYSICISTS have created the first atoms of antimatter, giving scientists a glimpse of what they say could be a "completely new anti-world". This historical achievement was announced on January 4, after months of careful checking of data. According to scientists, it is quite possible that the universe could contain stars …
The Hubble Space Telescope's position above the earth's atmosphere enables it to provide clearer pictures of the heavens. Now, with the first integrated test of adaptive optics, ground-based telescopes - visibility through which remained affected till date due to atmospheric turbulence - could do as well. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory …
Launched about five years ago, the spacecraft Ulysses has provided valuable information about the sun. Last year, it swung past the sun's south pole and into the ecliptic plane (the plane of the earth's orbit). The fly past provided a unique opportunity to gather information on the heliosphere, one of …
One of the challenges facing image processors has been the reconstruction of a three dimensional (3-D) image of human face from photographs. Recent work by J J Atick and others at Rockfeller University (USA) may lead to an accurate algorithm for the purpose. They started with the idea that all …
IMAGINE a tank which can hold 50,000 tonnes of water, located about a km under the earth. This is the latest neutrino detector which starts its operations in December in Japan. Located some 300 km west of Tokyo in a lead mine, the construction of the US $ 100 million …
IN THE vast expanses of the universe, the fact that we are the only planetary system around a star would stand out to be against all laws of probability. The chances are that there are many such extrasolar planets in the numerous galaxies which make up the universe. The rub …
THE speed with which new techniques are being introduced in many areas of science, has increased tremendously; whether it is faster techniques for gene sequencing or more efficient image processing algorithms, new methods have made possible many innovations which were hitherto inconceivable. Combinatorial chemistry, introduced a few years ago, was …
A NOVEL technique for storing and studying cold atoms using audio tapes and floppy disks has recently been developed. E Hinds and his colleagues at Yale University, US, have reported creating a magneto-optic trap alongwith a magnetic mirror, with which they have managed to trap rubidium atoms (Physical Review Letters, …
