When we want to weigh something, the process is simple. We place it on a weighing machine or on a traditional balance. The number appears and we instantly know how heavy the object is. But imagine a far stranger question. What if the thing you want to weigh is the very ground beneath the scale?…
There are some scientific discoveries that feel immediately sensible. Water is wet, fire is hot, politicians lie. And then there are discoveries that sound as though a group of slightly overworked researchers accidentally wandered into a Transformers writers’ room and decided to take the script seriously. Bumblebee queens, it turns out, can survive underwater for…
Ever squashed a bug underfoot and wondered why it just keeps buzzing? Now, picture a car tyre rolling right over it; most critters would be crushed, but not this diabolical ironclad beetle. Research published in Nature has found this unusual desert dweller from the US southwest shrugs off forces that would flatten other insects, thanks…
A routine space mission could turn into a historic ordeal. In May 1991, Sergei Krikalev blasted off for what was meant to be a standard five-month mission to the Mir space station. He was to perform experiments, maintain equipment, and keep the station in working order. Everything seemed ordinary at the time.Back on Earth, the…
NASA‘s Van Allen Probe A, a 600-kilogram satellite launched back in 2012, is plummeting back to Earth after 14 years studying the planet’s hazardous radiation belts. Amid headlines screaming “NASA satellite crash,” fears of destruction grip the public, yet experts insist the threat is minimal. Most of the spacecraft will incinerate in the atmosphere due…
The International Space Station (ISS) has shared a striking nighttime picture of India taken from orbit, offering a glowing view of the subcontinent illuminated by thousands of city lights as the spacecraft passed over the Arabian Sea and the Himalayan region.The image, posted on the ISS’s official account on X, shows India glowing under a…
In September 2023, a colossal landslide in Greenland’s Dickson Fjord triggered a megatsunami, causing the entire planet to vibrate every 90 seconds for nine days. An unprecedented seismic hum was detected worldwide. Satellites have now unveiled the cause: resonant fjord oscillations. A 25.5 million cubic metre rockslide, driven by climate change-induced glacial melt, plunged into…
Scientists from China have claimed they might have found a mineral that is harder than the cubic diamond, which is known to the world as the hardest existing mineral. The hexagonal diamond (HD) is supposedly the toughest mineral, though its existence remains questionable. Hexagonal diamond (also known as lonsdaleite) is usually found at sites impacted…
These days, there is an assumption worldwide that gold should be purchased for future investment. All the big investors would suggest buying gold as the best way to invest the money. Scientists at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) have developed a sustainable method to restore 22-carat gold from electronic waste using a protein…
PC: The Pennsylvania State University Astronomers seem to have pulled back a new curtain on the early universe. A massive 3D map now shows a “sea of light” that had been mostly invisible until recently. It’s not galaxies alone lighting up the cosmic stage; it’s the faint glow of hydrogen between them. This light comes…