Science

Hungarian researchers have found that artists tend to paint lightning with fewer branches than the bursts of electricity actually have. A study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A found the pictures and paintings differed mainly in the number of root-like offshoots.

Thomas Adams, a palaeontologist from Texas, United States, remembers the first time he saw Jurassic Park. And the second, and the third, and the fourth. They were, after all, all in the same month - and led to him quitting his job as a record store manager to study dinosaurs.

Days are going to get longer in future as the moon moves further away from the earth. A new study shows that 1.4 billion years ago, a day on the earth lasted just over 18 hours. 

The genesis of India's third outbreak of the rare but deadly Nipah virus is likely to remain a mystery forever. But disease detectives suspect it involved a 26-year-old plumber in Kerala's Sooppikkada village - a two-hour drive north of Kozhikode - who liked birds and animals and kept ducks and rabbits for pets.

Stamped across the shoreline of Calvert Island in British Columbia, Canada, are 13,000-year-old human footprints that archaeologists believe to be the earliest found in North America. The discovery, published in the journal PLOS One, adds support to the idea that some ancient humans from Asia ventured into North America by hugging the Pacific coastline.

In November last year, the results of a study published in the British medical journal, Lancet, threatened to upset many apple carts in cardiology. Researchers had, for the first time, compared the effects of angioplasty and a sham procedure on patients with stable angina and the results were unnerving.

Astronomers at the SkyMapper Southern Sky Observatory in Australia have discovered a black hole that's 20 billion times the mass of the sun and eating the equivalent of a star every two days.

Last week, more than 70 people died when thunderstorms and lightning hit five states of the country - West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Delhi. And last month, there was a news report that said Andhra Pradesh recorded 36,749 lightning strikes in a span of 13 hours, which is usually the number registered for a whole month in peak season.

Many have heard of Alan Turing (in pic), the mathematician and logician who invented modern computing in 1935. But did you know that Turing also explained patterns in nature with math? Recently, chemical engineers in China used the pattern generation described by Turing to explain a more efficient process for water desalination, which is increasingly being used to provide freshwater for drinking and irrigation in arid places. 

In 1893, Norwegian explorer and zoologist Fridtjof Nansen set off on a mission to the North Pole in a wooden vessel named Fram. His plan was to steer the manoeuvrable ship, made of the toughest oak timbers, in such a way that it got engulfed by sea ice and then use the natural drift of polar ice to reach the North Pole. All this would, of course, happen during peak winter.