Science

A federal judge on Thursday rejected a lawsuit by Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin against the US government over NASA’s decision to award a $2.9 billion (roughly Rs. 21,559 crore) lunar lander contract to rival billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Judge Richard Hertling of the US Court of Federal Claims in Washington granted the government’s

NASA’s International Space Station (ISS) saw its first harvest of crops on October 29. The agency shared a photo on Twitter and mentioned that the station’s first harvest was chilli peppers. This harvest was a part of an ISS experiment, called Plant Habitat-04 study. Astronaut Megan McArthur, who is stationed at the ISS, posted another

Boston Dynamics and IBM have joined forces to deploy the popular — but controversial — robot dogs at the US National Grid sites for autonomous inspection. The Boston Dynamics robot, named Spot, will be integrated with artificial intelligence (AI) and other required features developed by IBM Research. The new robot will be initially deployed at the electric and gas utility sites in

Agnikul Cosmos, an Indian space tech startup looking to take advantage of the massive space travel opportunity of the next decade, has been grabbing headlines in the recent times. From signing deals with Alaska Aerospace Corporation in the US, to signing an MoU with ISRO for accessing its infrastructure and technical expertise, Agnikul Cosmos has made giant leaps

The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced a new mission where human-made emissions of greenhouse gases will be tracked from space. ESA, in collaboration with the European Union’s (EU) Earth-monitoring programme Copernicus, announced this mission during the UN Climate Change Conference COP26 in Glasgow on November 2. It will incorporate a constellation of satellites called

NASA has signed a pact with National Geographic to help tell the story of Artemis II, the mission which will return US astronauts to the Moon after decades. The first Artemis mission, likely to be launched in February, will be an uncrewed test mission. Artemis II flight will carry astronauts around the Moon and back

Scientists may not be very far away from decoding the language of whales. An interdisciplinary group of scientists have started collecting data in order to use artificial intelligence (AI) to understand how whales communicate. The project has been named Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI). The first talks about the possibility to decode sperm whale sounds took

The help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been deployed by tech firms and NGOs worldwide to fight the climate change crisis. Gadgets 360 caught up with some, including the team at Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society (SEEDS) — a New Delhi-based NGO — and IBM India, to talk about their efforts to apply tech

For many, the evolution of humans is a discipline of great interest and curiosity – a way of ascertaining who we are and where we come from. Hence, finding and naming our ancestors is necessary. The practice of assigning names is of significance in science for several reasons, primarily because it helps researchers spread all

A massive solar flare could create dazzling northern lights over parts of the US on Sunday, according to NASA. The space agency said a sun storm erupted on October 28 and sent a vast cloud of charged particles that should reach Earth on Halloween (Sunday, October 31). When these particles hit Earth’s atmosphere, they will

China has launched a military satellite that will test its “space debris mitigation technology,” the state media reported earlier this week. The satellite was launched on Sunday from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre, Sichuan province, Southwest China. Though only a few details were available about the classified launch, some state media reports said the mission

With so much research getting published every day all over the world, a super-smart search engine has become essential to help parse through seemingly endless scores of academic papers. Faced with the challenge, a technologist has found a way to unlock the world’s research papers for easier computerised analysis. He has released an index of

Virtual clothing trials are the next big thing that can bring fashion and technology together. Computer scientists all around the world are trying to experiment with deep-learning techniques that can be used to virtually dress a 3D avatar (digital versions of humans). Developments in this field are being made in India too. Two researchers at

More than a year after NASA launched the Perseverance rover for Mars, the space agency is bringing the focus back on how its precise landing spot was decided or who chose where it should land. In an Instagram post, NASA said that the rover made the decision moments before it touched down on the surface

NASA’s main workhorse for deep-space observation has faced a new technical issue this week that has forced scientists to pull it into “safe mode”. The safe mode is designed to keep the Hubble Space Telescope, which has revealed several mysteries of outer space, stable and allow scientists to work on it to address whatever problem

In 1993, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park introduced the world to dinosaurs like never before. While researchers were interested in the reptile that occupied Earth hundreds of millions of years ago, the movie made people curious about it. Since then, technological advancements have let scientists uncover deep-buried facts about dinosaurs. Today, whatever we know about them,

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin on Monday announced it wants to launch a space station that will house up to 10 people in the second half of the decade, as the race to commercialize the cosmos heats up. “Orbital Reef,” described in a press statement as a mixed-use business park in space that will support microgravity

NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope has found hints of what could be the first planet discovered outside our Milky Way galaxy. The possible signal discovered is located in the Messier 51 galaxy, some 28 million light-years away from Earth. NASA’s Chandra Observatory has been designed in such a way that it can detect X-ray emissions from

NASA has announced that it was now targeting to launch the Artemis 1, an uncrewed mission that will return the American space agency to the Moon after decades, in February 2022. The rescheduling of the launch has delayed the mission by at least three months as the ambitious programme was initially set to take off

With Winter coming, air pollution in India is going to once again hit crisis levels soon. At the individual level we can wear masks and use air purifiers in our homes, but more broadly, cities and municipalities have also been installing outdoor air purifiers over several years now — but do these actually work? Have