Science & technology

The world’s largest supercomputer designed to work in the same way as the human brain has been switched on for the first time. The Spiking Neural Network Architecture machine is capable of completing more than 200 million million actions per second, with each of its chips having 100 million transistors. …

Praying mantids prey on smaller insects and sometimes the odd frog or lizard. Now, it looks like they’ve added fish to their menu too, for naturalists have observed one catching and eating small ornamental fish in a garden in Bengaluru. Guppy-catcher It was on the evening of March 7 last …

Natural recharge during monsoon may not help much if groundwater depletion becomes acute, as rainfall of past years controls current storage With 230 billion metre cube of groundwater drawn out each year for irrigating agriculture lands in India, many parts of the country are experiencing rapid depletion of groundwater. The …

The pH and salinity of the waters exceeded permissible limits for ecologically sensitive zones The water quality at the Point Calimere Wildlife Sanctuary might be unsafe for avifauna to feed and breed, notes a study that examined different pollution indicators in water. Researchers from Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli compared their results …

Sensitivity for pulmonary TB and pleural TB were 94% and 93%, respectively. A highly sensitive diagnostic test for pulmonary TB and pleural TB has been developed by a multi-institutional team led by Jaya Sivaswami Tyagi from the Department of Biotechnology at AIIMS. The diagnostic test makes use of a DNA …

Since April 2016, all oral polio vaccines (OPV) across the world contain only two of the three polio serotypes — Type 1 and Type 3. Type 2 is banned because the wild, disease-causing version of this virus was eradicated globally by 1999, and because OPV itself can cause polio in …

A major factor holding back development of wearable biosensors for health monitoring is the lack of a lightweight, long-lasting power supply. Now, scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the US have developed a method for making a charge-storing system that is easily integrated into clothing. “Batteries or other …

Anti-tobacco activists have expressed concern that comparing the ill-effects of air pollution to that of smoking will result in trivialising the catastrophic effects of smoking. They say that such comparisons also promote the theory that it is all right to smoke as the air that we breathe is equally harmful. …

Chinese state broadcaster unveils world’s first AI anchor China’s state-controlled news broadcasters have long been considered somewhat robotic in their daily recitation of pro-government propaganda and a pair of new presenters will do little to dispel that view. Calling it a “world first”, Xinhua news agency this week debuted a …

Emerging from the shadow of the Bofors scandal, the Army on Friday inducted its first artillery gun systems in three decades. The M777 Ultra Light Howitzers from the U.S. and K9 Vajra-T self-propelled artillery gun from South Korea were inducted at the Devlali Field Firing Ranges in Maharashtra. The third …