process

Mistakes happen. Especially when it comes to the replication of vast sequences of DNA inside our cells. It's a good thing too. If not for the errors in our genes we refer to as mutations, natural selection would be a no-go, and life would be dead in the water.  As crucial as mutations are to everything from disease to biodiversity, we know shockingly little about the physics of the process.Findings from the University of Surrey in the UK have revived speculations that a primary trigger behind the chemical sleight-of-hand…

The Rubin Observatory’s LSST Camera will take enormously detailed images of the night sky from atop a mountain in Chile. Down below the mountain, high-speed computers will send the data out into the world. What happens in between?When the Vera C. Rubin Observatory begins photographing the night sky in a few years, its centerpiece 3,200 megapixel Legacy Survey of Space and Time camera will provide a massive amount of data useful to everyone from cosmologists to individuals who track asteroids that may strike Earth.You may…

Diagram of groundwater extraction. Credit: Wang Longhuan The rapid development of agriculture and industry in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region leads to an increase in water demand. Excessive groundwater extraction often results in the water depletion that may affect ecological and hydrological processes.…

NASA has begun a three-month process to align the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), so that the $10-billion (roughly Rs. 74,710 crore) observatory could start doing what it was sent for: study the universe like never before. It also recently saw the first particles of light making their way through the entire telescope. So far, this is the closest scientists have come to realising their ultimate goal with the telescope. During the initial process, the images remain blurred and scientists will use them slowly to fine-tune…

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has been aligned to produce the first unified image of a single star, reaching a critical milestone in its journey to unravel the mysteries of the world far beyond our reach. Most traditional telescopes have a single primary mirror that collects light from distant stars. But Webb has 18 hexagonal mirror segments that had to be aligned into a single large mirror to produce images that could help astronomers study the universe. The process was long and tedious and required great precision.…

When most people think of 3D printing, they likely picture a relatively chunky object being built from the bottom up, one layer at a time. A new technique, however, allows much more intricate items to be produced – and it does so by changing the color of laser light.Currently being developed by a team at Stanford University, the process is a variation on what is known as volumetric 3D printing.Putting it simply, that type of printing involves shining beams or patterns of light through the transparent top and sides of a…