Science

If you are planning a trip to the South Pole, you must tuck this map into your parka. The most accurate map - called the Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica - of the southernmost continent was recently released by a group of American researchers. 

In 2003, researchers digging in a mountain cave on the Indonesian island of Flores discovered astonishing fossils of a tiny, humanlike individual with a small, chimp-sized brain. They called the species Homo floresiensis.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft still has 100 million miles to go, but it has taken its first snapshot of the space rock (MU 69) that will be its date for New Year's Day 2019. 

Kerala recently saw unprecedented floods due to heavy rains. Hundreds died, lakhs are displaced. And some people are laying the blame for it at the door of the meteorological department. If the deluge had been predicted at the right time, precautions could have been taken and lives saved, they say. They are perhaps expecting too much from the weatherman.

The Arctic ice cap isn't threatened just by melting ice around its edges, warmer water that originated hundreds of kilometres away has also penetrated deep into the Arctic Ocean. This "archived" heat, currently trapped below the surface, can melt all the sea ice if it reaches the surface, researchers report in the journal, Science Advances. The upper ocean in the Canadian Basin, for example, has seen a two-fold increase in heat content over the past 30 years, with its source hundreds of miles south. Arctic winds are driving the warmer water north, but keeping it below the surface.

Just over the border from Georgia, in the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia, lies a small town called Neytrino. For the last half-century, its main business has been the study of the tiniest insubstantial bit of matter in the universe, an ephemeral fly-by-night subatomic particle called the neutrino.

If you hate to clean your room and love to laze around, there's nothing to worry. It turns out that you are simply trying to survive. A study at the University of Kansas suggests that species that spend more energy on a daily basis are at greater risk of becoming extinct than those that are more sedentary. 

We want to give your child the best possible start," explains the geneticist in 1997's film Gattaca, to the parents in his clinic. "We have enough imperfection built in already. Your child doesn't need any more. Keep in mind, this child is still you. Simply, the best of you. You could conceive naturally a thousand times and never get such a result."

The Red Planet has always exercised a pull on us Earthlings. And all the rovers and voyagers we put on Mars have now given us enough information about the rusty planet - Martian dust is full of iron oxide - to know that it was once splashed by oceans and carved by rivers, warmed by an atmosphere.

This week, whenever you get a chance, look up at the night sky -you will be treated to celestial fireworks, thanks to the Perseid meteor shower. The shower is an annual event that occurs between July 17 and August 24, when the earth passes through the path of debris released by Comet Swift-Tuttle. The dust particles left behind by the comet on its journey towards the sun light up the sky as they streak through the atmosphere.