Understand

Black holes are thought to reside at the centre of most galaxies, including our Milky Way, holding important clues to the functioning of these giants. A group of researchers has now found a previously overlooked trove of massive black holes in dwarf galaxies. Black holes are usually detected when they actively grow by consuming gas around them, which makes them glow intensely. These black holes, the researchers believe, can offer insights into the journey of the supermassive black hole that sits at the centre of the Milky…

And Choose To Manually Define and Control your BigQuery Table SchemaPhoto by Michał Jakubowski on UnsplashSchema auto-detection is an attractive feature people think of when they need to create a database table. Think about it! Being able to automatically detect a data schema sounds really great because it allows to save the time that was traditionally devoted to defining data schemas manually.It’s no surprise BigQuery offers the schema auto-detection capacity for a couple of data types including CSV,…

You've probably read the stories proclaiming that eating blueberries reduces your risk of dementia, or red wine is good for your heart, or coffee protects against type 2 diabetes – or, indeed, many of the other big health claims for a particular "superfood". But what is the truth in these statements?  While we – a group of nutritional scientists – have been involved in this kind of research, we are not responsible for the headlines. Underneath those attention-grabbing stories, however, there is important and serious…

With Russian forces pushing deep into Ukraine, bombarding Kharkiv, Kyiv and other cities, and an unprecedented wave of western sanctions pushing the rouble down to an all-time low, it is hard for any of us to tear our eyes away from the news. But the currents of history that led up to this crisis are deep and complex, and understood in profoundly different ways in Moscow and Kyiv.The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy is a great place to start reading up on the background to the crisis. It tells the…

Earlier this week Rajasthan High Court refused to quash an FIR naming Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for allegedly defaming the Brahmin community. The FIR was filed following last month’s outrage over a picture on Twitter in which the CEO was seen posing with a poster that said “Smash Brahminical Patriarchy”. The picture had been taken in a closed-door meeting where Dorsey met with a group of women journalists, activists and organizers, to understand their experiences with the platform. Dorsey received massive criticism…

Researchers at the Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) here in collaboration with the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) have developed an optogenetic tool which can help understand brain disorders like Alzheimer's disease, depression and schizophrenia.In a statement, the JMI said that the tool can study molecular trafficking in neurons and has been developed by Dr Tanveer Ahmad, who did his postdoctoral training at NIH, before joining the Multidisciplinary Centre for Advanced Research and Studies (MCARS) at the varsity as an…

"Please help/ support our warriors," a Chennai techie who became a Zomato delivery worker for a couple of days wrote in a post on LinkedIn, explaining the challenges he faced in his short experience.Srinivasan Jayaraman, who recently left his job as an IT analyst at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), joined Zomato for two days in late March to understand the problems faced by those delivering orders for restaurant aggregators such as Zomato and Swiggy face on a daily basis."As a human, I just wanted to understand other…