The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has published the R&D; Roadmap for Green Hydrogen Ecosystem in India. This document was published on 13th October, 2023. One of the central pillars of the National Green Hydrogen Mission is the establishment of a supportive research and innovation ecosystem for green hydrogen …
SOUTH Africa can break new ground in the world of science if only its scientists and researchers show the government the right way. In an impassioned speech made at a conference held at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, Bernie Faranoff, the official in charge of South Africa's Reconstruction and …
EXPERIMENTS are underway off the Nellore coastline in Andhra Pradesh to create artificial coral reefs which can act as natural breeding grounds for aquatic life. They are being conducted by Jagriti, a Nellore-based voluntary organisation working for the upliftment of fisherfolk.The 175 km Nellore coastline has been almost taken over …
J. Craig Venter, till now just another scientist who once worked with Washington's National Institute of Health and whose only claim to fame, or rather notoriety was his much-publicised row with the Institute authorities which refused to grant funds for his project on human genome sciences, has finally hit the …
Another particle has been smoked out of the woodwork. The Eureka yell on March 2 this year that the top quark had been caught en flagrante at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, USA, was another milestone in the search for the fundamental building blocks of nature: …
The bedrock of our present day understanding of particle physics is the Standard Model. This model seeks to understand the interactions of elementary particles by building up on the 2 pillars of 20th century physics: quantum mechanics and relativity; and abstract concepts of internal symmetries. Electromagnetic interaction has been well …
Over 200 subatomic (or fundamental) particles have been detected so far. Each appears to have an antiparticle, which possesses the same mass as the particle but manifests the opposite side of one other common quality such as the electric charge. For instance, an electron which is negatively charged will have …
Some parasites that thrive in animals find their human hosts rather hostile. For instance, a protozoan called Trypanosoma brucei brucei (T b brucei), which infects both humans and cattle, quickly degenerates in the former's blood. But in cattle, the bug causes a disease resembling African sleeping sick- ness in humans. …
Paluther, an anti-malarial drug developed by Chinese scientists in 1973, promises new hope to the millions suffering from the killer disease. On trial for the past 3 years in Tanzania and Kenya, the drug is expected to replace chloroquine and other anti-malarials in use in the 2 countries. Shrikant Bhatt, …
IF FRAUDSTERs have devised ingenious ways to dupe banks and financial institutions of millions of dollars each year, then scientists trying to combat forgery have certainly not lagged behind. Recently, British researchers unveiled the latest, state-of-art electronic signature verification system that uses neural network technology to detect forgeries with 95 …
WHY is a city hotter than its surrounding countryside? The first answer that comes to mind is the availability of open space and trees in the countryside. Now, Haider Taha and his colleagues at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) in Berkeley, California, and the University of California, Los Angeles, say …
IMAGINE this: 2 prisoners are charged with a crime which they allegedly committed together. If neither confesses - that is, they agree to 'cooperate' - each will serve a term, say 1 year. If one honours the pact between the 2 prisoners to cooperate, while the other 'defects', blaming the …
THE WORK done by a team of about 100 astronomers may provide us with the first hints of the answer to a long-standing query - what powers the starlike celestial objects called quasars? (Science, Vol 267, No 5205). Quasars appear like stars from the earth, but are as far off …
The scientist community in South Africa has heaved a giant sigh of relief. the National Accelerator Centre (NAC), the country's largest research facility and the highest energy cyclotron in the southern hemisphere, located near Cape Town, has been spared the axe, at least for the time being. Researchers have been …
Researchers from the US department of energy's Pacific Northwest Laboratory (PNL) in Richland have developed a new fibreoptic sensor that can immediately detect 2 of the most common radioactive contaminents left over from nuclear power generation and weapons development. The BetaScintTM sensor relies on tiny fibreoptic strands to detect radioactive …
British researchers are developing a voice recognition system that can identify a speaker if he or she is drunk or even has a cold. This could help reduce fraud involving cash machines and credit cards, which British banks say costs them over f,150 million annually. The new system, called Time-Encoded …
A REPORT sponsored by the department of science and technology (DST), called Profile and Productivity of Academic Science in India, gives policymakers a clear window into research by the scientific community. The report, which was finalised in late March and had been stretched out over 3 years, covered 1,075 academics …
GERMAN researchers have developed a tiny reversible pump which allows through just 50 nanolitres of liquid, equivalent to 1/1,000th of a drop of water. The micropump was designed by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute based in Munich for Solid State Technology. The pump consists of 4 silicon chips superimposed on …
BELOW a few shimmering points of achievements, the underside of Indian science is a vast abyss of failure and frustration. The contours of the 7th largest pool of scientifically trained personnel in the world are largely unmapped, simply because any social cartographer's exploration into this field makes for a gloomy …
JET-lagged globetrotters are familiar with that peculiar urge to sleep when they should be wide awake, and vice versa. They'll blame casually it on a biological clock shot to bits by all their indiscriminate peregrinations. But the biological clock is no minor functionary: it is the "internal timekeeper" of our …
HAVE you ever thought what prevents aquatic organisms living in and around the icy continent of Antarctica from freezing? Researchers believe that an enzyme -- lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) -- plays an important role in keeping these organisms metabolically active, and helps them survive even at sub-zero temperatures. S Shivaji, a …
