Author: auto_blogs

When people on the internet searched Google for “cheese not sticking to pizza” in May 2024, the newly launched “AI Overviews” feature of the popular search engine replied “you can … add about ⅛ cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness.”In a series of strange answers, the artificial intelligence (AI) tool also recommended that people eat one small rock a day and drink urine in order to pass kidney stones.The popular name for these bizarre answers is hallucinations: when AI models face questions whose answers they weren’t trained to come up with, they make up…

CCMB Director Vinay Kumar Nandicoori and IICT Director D. Srinivas Reddy at a press conference held in Hyderabad on Wednesday (April 16, 2025) | Photo Credit: BY ARRANGEMENT CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT) and CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) are working on ‘Anti-Viral Mission’ to come up with drugs and diagnostics to deal with potential emerging viruses in the near future.CCMB Director Vinay Kumar Nandicoori and IICT Director D. Srinivas Reddy at a press conference held in Hyderabad on Wednesday (April 16, 2025) said that the scientific collaboration is not only to repurpose the existing anti-viral drugs…

Science Quiz | The world’s oldest lifeforms Name this micro-animal. It’s renowned for being able to survive harsh conditions, including outer space, and evolved around 500 million years ago. Credit: Kiosya Y., Vončina K., Gąsiorek P. (2021)START THE QUIZ 1 / 6 | Scientists widely believe X are the first lifeforms on the earth that produced oxygen, and thus filled the atmosphere with this gas during the Great Oxidation Event around 2.4-2 billion years ago. Name X. 2 / 6 | This particular form of rock is created when X (from Q1) forms large colonies where each member is connected…

Bike riders passed through the parched forest area near Kulapully in Kerala’s Shoranur where trees are drying due to a lack of water and extreme weather conditions. File photo | Photo Credit: The Hindu In the early spring of 2022, South Asian countries including India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan experienced back-to-back extreme heat waves in the months of March and April. A study published on April 8, 2025, by researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay and Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany, has uncovered why South Asian countries experienced back-to-back extreme heat events in early spring of 2022.  Also read:…

The mantis shrimp is a colourful, 10-cm-long resident of the ocean whose appearance belies its reputation as one of the most fearsome predators on the planet.These unassuming crustaceans use a hammer-shaped appendage called the dactyl club to strike their prey at a blistering 23 m/s (about 50-times faster than the blink of an eye), smashing into the poor creature’s body like a bullet from a gun fired point blank. The strike releases enough energy to send small shockwaves through the surrounding water.But the thing about guns is that every bullet fired has a recoil. It’s Newton’s third law of motion.…

A scientist walking in a tunnel inside the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) Large Hadron Collider, during maintenance works on July 19, 2013, in Meyrin, near Geneva. File | Photo Credit: AFP The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment at CERN — Europe’s premier research centre for particle physics and home to the world’s largest particle accelerator — that won the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics has an Indian connection. A team led by Bhawna Gomber at the Centre for Advanced Study in Electronics, Science and Technology (CASEST), School of Physics, University of Hyderabad (UoH), played a key role…

GUWAHATIAn informal network of individuals and organisations working together to foster the knowledge and practice of ecological restoration of natural ecosystems in India is releasing a first-of-its-kind seed germination database on Wednesday (April 16, 2025).This free-access database, an initiative of the Ecological Restoration Alliance-India (ERA-I), offers more than 1,000 germination techniques for 465 native plant species. It intends to “make it easier for restoration practitioners, nursery managers, and native plant enthusiasts” to be more successful with growing native plants in nurseries.“One of the fundamental and most practical steps in the process for ecological restoration is to create a native plant nursery,…

Image used for representation only | Photo Credit: Pixabay The Hindu’s weekly Science for All newsletter explains all things Science, without the jargon.(This article forms a part of the Science for All newsletter that takes the jargon out of science and puts the fun in! Subscribe now!) When a drop of water falls on a glass top, there’s a splash. As the bead strikes the glass, its momentum, until then moving downward, is transferred in a horizontal direction. This sudden redistribution of energy causes a sheet of the liquid, called a lamella, to peel off from the drop. It’s lifted up…

Primates, which include humans, apes, monkeys and lemurs are diverse in traits like brain size, diet, locomotion and habitat. Using insights from recent advances in primate genomics and studying the DNA of over 500 primate species, scientists have uncovered the genetic secrets behind their evolutionary success and ecological flexibility. A global team of scientists, including key researchers from the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology’s LaCONES (Laboratory for the Conservation of Endangered Species) in Hyderabad, has made a breakthrough in understanding how primates have evolved over millions of years. Led in India by Govindhaswamy Umapathy’s lab at CCMB-LaCONES, the research…

A: To keep our torso stable and conserve energy, we swing our arms backwards and forwards while walking. When you swing, say, your right leg forward to take a step, you provide a rotational moment about the central vertical axis of your torso. By the principle of conservation of angular momentum, an opposite reactionary moment is felt by your torso.By swinging your right arm backwards and your left arm forwards, you counterbalance this moment. Just try running without swinging your arms at all.Or worse still, try running while swinging your arms in the opposite direction to normal: that is, swing…