ecological sciences Bird diversity is anti-viral Greater bird diversity protects humans from a deadly virus known to cause meningitis. The West Nile Virus, usually maintained in a bird-mosquito cycle in nature, can be transmitted to humans through a mosquito bite. Biologists from Washington University recently said most birds are bad reservoirs for the virus and so it fails to further
On October 2, the social networking site Bebo teamed up with an expert in radio communication, Alexander Zaitsev, to beam 500 messages from users into space. Zaitsev used a Ukrainian radio telescope, normally used to identify and track asteroids
THE first orbit reduction manoeuvre of Chandrayaan-1 has been successfully completed, taking the spacecraft as near as 200 km from the moon, according to space agency Isro. As part of the manoeuvre, which began at 20:09 IST on Sunday, the 440 newton liquid engine of the spacecraft was fired for about 57 seconds, a statement by Isro said.
The Indian Space Research Organisation's moon mission marks the first venture into "deep space" for an indigenous satellite. India now joins a select club of nations which have achieved this "milestone".
On September 10, at 10.28 am , local time, the first beam of the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva was steered around a 27 km long tunnel. This event had intended and unintended consequences. Both are of great importance to us, though in vastly different ways.
Why does a developing nation have such an ambitious space programme? Subhadra Menon traces its foundations back to the work of one visionary physicist 60 years ago.
