From time immemorial man has dreamt of encounters with the aliens. There have been books written on it, movies made and it is the stuff of romantic scientific fantasy. I am however certain that even if there were other intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, chances are that we will never get to communicate with them. This, in spite of the fact that there was a news item some days back that the chances of finding alien life were given a boost after NASA revealed it had found evidence of more than 1200 planets in orbit around far distant stars. It… Continue Reading
Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
In a world’s first, scientists claim to have created a new generation of genetically modified pigs which they say are greener and fit for human consumption. According to its creators, the Enviro-pigs look, sound and taste like normal pigs, but are designed to be greener – each contains genes from mice and Ecoli bacteria which have been inserted into their DNA with absolute precision. Those genes make a small but important difference to the way these pigs process their food and so, their manure contains less phosphorus than normal slurry and poses less risk to rivers, streams and lakes,… Continue Reading 
Some days back I read an interesting piece of information titled – Cycling for even 5 hours / week makes sperm less active! I read the complete article and the gist of the article is given below: 1. Most exercise appears to have little relationship to either the quality or quantity of sperm. 2. However, men who bike at least five hours a week have fewer and less active sperm than men who didn’t. These are the finding of a study published in “Fertility and Sterility” and has been carried out at Boston University. While it is not possible for… Continue Reading 
New research from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) published on Dec 16, 2010 says that football penalty shootouts give an unfair psychological advantage to the team that shoots first. I am sure there must have been some statistical study done to arrive at this conclusion, but I have my reservations. More on that a little later – first let us get the complete story as reported in The Times of India today. It mentions that professor Ignacio Palacios-Huerta and co-author Jose Apesteguia, an associate professor at Pompeu Farba University in Barcelona, studied 2820 kicks from shootouts in major… Continue Reading |
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