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In this edition of The Interview, Fair Observer talks to Joachim Frank, the 2017 Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry. The Nobel Prize, the most prestigious in life sciences, is awarded annually to individuals who have made the most notable contributions to the fields of chemistry, physics,...
In this guest edition of The Interview, Vikram Zutshi talks to physicist, activist and author Fritjof Capra. Fritjof Capra is an Austrian-born American physicist, systems theorist and deep ecologist. He has written many popular books that connect conceptual changes in science with broader...
Martin Rees looks back on a colleague’s spectacular success against all odds. Soon after I enrolled as a graduate student at Cambridge University in 1964, I encountered a fellow student, two years ahead of me in his studies, who was unsteady on his feet and spoke with great difficulty. This...
In his 1945 Nobel lecture, Alexander Fleming predicted that the improper use of antibiotics would cause future clinical failures. Penicillin, discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928, became known as the “miracle drug” for its instrumental role in the Second World War, when the Allied forces...
Arriving from deep space, an interstellar object named Oumuamua entered our solar system. In October, American astronomers found the first interstellar object in our solar system. Amid its daily ritual of searching for objects near Earth, the Pan-STARR1 telescope in Hawaii spotted the object...
With foreign space industries developing, it is only a matter of time before they begin to market their own crewed spacecraft capabilities. As America’s commercial space sector blossoms, opportunities abound for private industry to secure a controlling lead in the growing and globalizing space...
Scientists are often steered by their sense of beauty in developing new theories. Science is truth, candor, fidelity, damage and destruction — a loud and clear call of modern civilization — more so, in today's context, the epoch of wonders and also devastation. It bids fair to a maxim...
NASA may have found the ingredients for sustainable life on Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. In 2015, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft was launched into a plume of gas and ice spraying form the south pole of one of Saturn’s moons. The instrument, acting as a human nose, has the ability to detect the...
With pollution causing more and more premature deaths worldwide each year, can trees be the answer to improving public health? Pollution is not only detrimental to the wellbeing of our environment, but it is also extremely hazardous to our personal health. Inhaling polluted air fills our lungs...
Scientists have found seven planets that are like Earth, might have water and even life, raising questions about the universe and our place in it. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered “the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star.” These planets are...
The moon is a safer bet, not Mars. Well, at least for now. I still remember the night when my siblings, my father, some workers on the farm and I sat around a fire on a cold night in the middle of a jungle, and listened to a decrepit old radio. It was the late 1960s in western India and we were...
