Category: Science
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Which gland in the hypothalamus of your brain is responsible for releasing special hormones that trigger the onset of puberty?
The hypothalamus is a small but important area in the center of the brain. It plays an important role in hormone production and helps to stimulate many important processes in the body and is located in the brain, between the pituitary gland and thalamus. The hypothalamus is responsible for the regulation of certain metabolic processes and other activities…
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Who is Govind Swarup, and how is he connected to radio telescopes?
Govind Swarup was a radio astronomer and one of the pioneers of radio astronomy, known not only for his many important research contributions in several areas of astronomy and astrophysics, but also for his outstanding achievements in building ingenious, innovative and powerful observational facilities for front-line research in radio astronomy. He was the key scientist behind concept, design and installation…
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Who is Jocelyn Bell, and how is she linked to Radio Astronomy?
Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967.[9] She was credited with “one of the most significant scientific achievements of the 20th century”. Burnell was a PhD student at Cambridge at the time and was working with her supervisor Hewish to make radio observations of the universe.…
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Who is considered to be the founder of the field called Radio Astronomy?
Radio astronomy is a subfield of astronomy that studies celestial objects at radio frequencies. The first detection of radio waves from an astronomical object was in 1932, when Karl Jansky at Bell Telephone Laboratories observed radiation coming from the Milky Way. Subsequent observations have identified a number of different sources of radio emission. These include stars and galaxies, as well as entirely new classes of objects, such as radio galaxies, quasars, pulsars,…
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What are pulsars used for?
Pulsars are spherical, compact objects that are about the size of a large city but contain more mass than the sun. Scientists are using pulsars to study extreme states of matter, search for planets beyond Earth’s solar system and measure cosmic distances. Pulsars also could help scientists find gravitational waves, which could point the way…
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The Arecibo Observatory, a massive telescope, collapsed on December 1, 2020. What kind of a telescope was it?
The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico has collapsed, after weeks of concern from scientists over the fate of what was once the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope. The telescope was built in the early 1960s, with the intention of studying the ionised upper part of Earth’s atmosphere, the ionosphere. But it was soon being used as…
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What is K2 peak?
K2 is located at 28251 ft above sea level, which makes it the second highest mountain in the world, after Mount Everest at 29029 ft. The location of K2 is between Baltistan in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of north Pakistan and the Dafdar Township in Taxkorgan Tajik of Xinjiang, China. K2 is also referred to as Mount Godwin-Austen in honour…
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What is deep-sea mining?
Environmental advocacy groups such as Greenpeace have been appealing to the UN’s International Seabed Authority (ISA) against giving license to companies to carry out deep-sea mining. Highlighting that the industry is inadequately regulated in a report published last week, Greenpeace has drawn attention to the threats facing the deep-ocean ecosystem from deep-sea mining. Mining…
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What are anaerobic bacteria?
Anaerobic bacteria are part of normal flora of human skin and mucosal membranes. The site of anaerobic infection is commonly the site of normal colonization. The spectrum of infections ranges from local abscesses to life-threatening infections. Anaerobic bacteria differ from aerobic bacteria in their oxygen requirement. Oxygen is toxic to anaerobes which can be explained by the absence of enzymes…
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On September 14, 2015, the LIGO detectors detected for the first time in the lab by LIGO in 2015, cataclysmic merging of which two celestial bodies?
The new Advanced LIGO detectors had just been brought into operation for their first observing run when the very clear and strong signal was captured. This discovery comes at the culmination of decades of instrument research and development, through a world-wide effort of thousands of researchers, and made possible by dedicated support for LIGO from…