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 …
TREMENDOUS advances in computer technology have been the order of the day in the last decade. The machines have become faster, more robust and capable of handling much more data than before (Science, Vol 269). For instance, the latest Intel 80586 chip (Pentium) works at almost 100 MHZ, compared to …
POWER generation using fusion reactors has long been seen as the panacea for humankind's unquenchable thirst for energy. If feasible, fusion will not only be economical but also one of the cleanest sources of power. There is only one snag: we are still many years from building an operational fusion …
IMAGINE a pulse of light which lasts for only a few hundred billionths of a billionth of a second (10-18 seconds, or an attosecond). This is about the time that light travelling at 300 million metres per second takes to move across an atom! If the calculations of some theorists …
QUASARS are among the most intriguing objects in the sky. Discovered in the early 1960s, these quasi-stellar bodies, as they were termed then, are the most luminous objects in the universe which appear like stars optically, but are at distances similar to the most distant galaxies. At these distances, they …
When the US Congress voted to cancel the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) last year, a lot of money had already been sunk into the project. Now with the biggest technological project in science definitely dead, the state of Texas - which had given 650 ha of land and about US …
While the last few years has seen a revolution in optoelectronks, there have been several stumbling blocks too. One such obstacle is the integration of optical components with silicon microchips. But scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, may have come up with a solution finally (Science, Vol 268). The …
Analysis of about 90 quasars in the ongoing quasar survey at the 500 cm telescope at Mount Palomar, California, has shed some interesting light on the ages of quasars (see accompanying story). From the redshift data, it seems that most of the quasars formed and faded away in a short …
ANYONE even vaguely familiar with equations of physics, would recall the universal gravitational constant, denoted by the letter G. Besides G, there are several other physical quantities which govern the strength of interactions between the elementary particles of matter and are 'deemed to have a fixed value. These are generally …
IMAGING technology has come a long way since W Roentgen discovered x- rays in 1895. A variety of techniques, using a range of the electromagnetic spectrum, has been used to study biological tissues as well as materials. And imaging technologies such as Nuclear electromagnetic spectrum is Magnetic Resonance and Positron …
WHAT microelectronics was to the '70s and the '80s, optoelectronics promises to be for the 21st century. Optoelectronic circuits are finding increasing use in many diverse areas like telecommunications, imaging technology and high speed computing. One of the major areas of research has been to fabricate optical circuits. A combination …
Researchers at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, have photographed images of the growth of Helium-3 crystals. The crystals, grown at a temperature of 0.001' Kelvin - close to the lowest temperature obtainable theoretically, which is 0* Kelvin - were shot by a charge-coupled device camera (Science, Vol 268, No …
One ofthe most controversial of scientific projects, Gravity Probe-B, has won the approval of an expert panel of the National Academy of Sciences. The project, proposed by Stanfora physicist Francis Everitt, envisages sending a probe in orbit around the Earth to test Einstein's General , Theory of Relativity (Science, Vol …
A whole issue of the journal Annals ofMathematics is to be devoted to a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, arguably the most famous of mathematical problems (Science, Vol 268, No 5214). The proof, first announced by Princeton mathematician Andrew Wiles about 2 years ago, is now corrected and all the …
BLACK holes provide an excellent laboratory to test the theories of astrophysics and gravity. There is, however, one small hitch: it is not possible to "see" a black hole because its high gravity doesn't let light produced inside it to come out. A group of researchers has now come closest …
It is exactly 60 years since the publication of 2 "thought experiments" designed to demonstrate the absurdity of quantum mechanics, and to make physicists come up with a better view of reality than the standard 'Copenhagen interpretation' of quantum physics. The Copenhagen interpretation is the standard way quantum physics is …
All of us are familiar with real numbers. But numbers having both real and imaginary parts are called complex numbers. A complex number (y) can be denoted as y=a+ib Where a and b are real numbers and I is an imaginary number (defined as the square root of -1). In …
TILL recently, matter was for scientists a chimera that had 4 known faces -- solid, liquid, gas, and the lesser known plasma, a state of matter that materialises at extremely high temperatures. But 70 years ago, Einstein had posited a new state of matter existent at extremely low temperatures, very …
MICROCHIPS form the basis of several devices, such as Min (magnetic resonance imaging) scanners and pacemakers, which have revolutionised medical diagnosis and treatment. Now, microchips may also provide relief to many people suffering from blindness. Researchers working on the Project for a Retinal Implant, a joint effort of the Massachusetts …
Texas A&M; University researchers have reported finding DNA traces in the pigment used in 3,000-4,000 year old cave paintings discovered in Texas (Science, Vol 268, No 5210). Paint samples were analysed using the polymerase chain reaction to amplify a section of DNA. The researchers eliminated the possibility of later day …
