Science

Listening to electro-magnetic waves around the earth - converted to sound - is almost like listening to the chirping of birds. Such waves, known as chorus waves, cause polar lights and can also damage spacecraft. 

Recently, Amazon India started listing a book series for children, titled Ada Lace, which revolves around a “third-grade scientist and inventor extraordinaire” but has zero overload of technical details. The books are so entertaining, educational and addictive that my kid wants me to buy the entire series! Go beyond the books, and its author will inspire children. Emily Calandrelli, 31, is also the host and producer of popular US TV show Xploration Outer Space. The MIT alumna took a few questions from t2 over email. Here’s what she has to say.

It is said that the eyes are the windows to the soul. But most people make snap judgements about other people based not on the eyes but on the face. The tendency to trust beautiful, symmetrical faces more than uneven or disfigured ones is a primitive impulse. Neuroscientist Anjan Chatterjee (in picture below), director of the new Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics at the University of Pennsylvania and member of the Center for Cognitive Studies, has been exploring the neural underpinnings of the aesthetic experience for a while.

Tiny blue crystals trapped inside meteorites, from the dawn of the Solar System, confirmed that the newborn Sun was hyperactive. Stars are typically violently active in their early phase of evolution. The baby Sun -born about 4.6 billion years ago, 50 million years before the Earth - was no exception. 

A friend will help you move, goes an old saying, while a good friend will help you move a body. And why not? Moral qualms aside, that good friend would most likely agree the victim was an intolerable jerk who had it coming and, jeez, you shouldn't have done this but where do you keep the shovel?

Scientists at the University of Alberta in the US have created the most dense solid-state memory device. It can store a thousand times more data than current computer storage devices. The scientists used the technology they developed to manufacture atomic-scale circuits to make this drive, said lead researcher Roshan Achal.

Do you know that billions of mysterious particles go through you every second? But don't worry, they cause no harm. Like ghosts, they can slip through matter.

A Kiwi father-son duo has captured 3D colour X-rays of the human body based on a technology developed at CERN. The new scanner developed by the radio-logist son, Anthony Butler, and his physicist father, Phil, may eventually help diagnose cancers and blood diseases more accurately and without invasive surgery. The device was adapted from a pixel-detecting tool that physicists use for particle tracking at the Large Had-ron Collider (LHC) at CERN.

The recent ORBITA trial on the efficacy of angioplasty ("Stent dent", published on May 28) threw up a surprising finding; people who were treated with a sham procedure showed as much improvement as those who had angioplasty.

A recent Zika epidemic in Brazil led to hundreds of babies with mental disability. Now, scientists have combined thousands of two-dimensional images of the Zika virus to come up with a detailed three-dimensional image of it, research published in the journal, Structure, says.