International Young Scientist Awards

Ekart, one of India’s leading 4 PL supply chain companies, has introduced a comprehensive ‘Refinish Service’ tailored to address the challenges of returns management in the fashion and lifestyle sector. This initiative marks a significant leap forward in efficient and sustainable return logistics management, offering brands unparalleled solutions to reclaim sellable inventory. In an era where customer returns pose a significant challenge for fashion brands, especially with products like apparel and footwear that have been tried at home or have minor defects, Ekart’s refinish service emerges as a transformative solution. By refurbishing over 90% of returned inventory, Ekart enables brands to mitigate losses and maximize revenue potential. This service targets direct-to-consumer (D2C), e-commerce, and retail players in the fashion and lifestyle segments. In addition to fashion and lifestyle brands, Ekart’s refinish service extends to industries like footwear, handbags, accessories, and ...

Amid mounting concerns over the state of the climate and environment, significant efforts have been spent developing innovative solutions to reduce plastic waste and capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere — most addressing one crisis at a time. However, researchers have recently devised a sustainable, closed-loop process for producing and recycling polycarbonate plastic while also capturing carbon, effectively addressing the two challenges simultaneously. Conventional plastics recycling is a mechanical process that involves sorting, cleaning, and granulating the plastic into flakes before heating it at high temperature, and not all plastics can be recycled in this way — though it is more environmentally friendly than incineration or landfill disposal. “However, [mechanical recycling] has a critical issue because repeated exposure to high heat can cause permanent changes in the chemical structure of the plastic, resulting in poor-quality recycled plastics,” explained Hoyong Chung, ...

According to popular theory, dark matter — a hypothetical entity believed to permeate the Universe — is made up of constituent particles that are many orders of magnitude lighter than any known particle in the Standard Model of Physics. While this hypothesis helps explain phenomena such as galactic dark matter halos, regions of increased dark matter density surrounding galaxies, it has a fatal flaw arising from probabilistic and quantum effects, particularly quantum tunneling. Tunneling affects the probability of dark matter particles “jumping” or tunneling from one gravitational potential well to another. Dark matter from smaller satellite galaxies should therefore be steadily migrating to the larger ones they orbit, resulting in the smaller galaxies losing their mass. According to this theory, this should have led to their disappearance. Tiny interactions make a big difference In a study, scientists propose that this discrepancy can be reconciled if tiny interactions between dark ma...

Planetary alignment is a term used to describe the positioning of planets The Moon will play a spoilsport Mercury, and Jupiter will be tricky to see in the sky Weeks after the total solar eclipse amazed people in several parts of the world, stargazers will be treated to a rare alignment of six planets gracing the early morning skies. The alignment will take place in the first week of June as the planets line up in a rare cosmic event. Planetary alignment is a term used to describe the positioning of planets in the solar system such that they appear to be in a straight line or close to one when viewed from a specific vantage point, for us that's Earth. This phenomenon is more an illusion of perspective rather than the planets being in a perfect line in space. WHAT PLANETS WILL ALIGN? Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune will form a near-straight line, offering an extraordinary opportunity to witness this cosmic phenomenon. WHICH PLANETS WILL BE VISIBLE? While six pla...

  The US FDA has approved Neuralink's brain chip for a second patient, a comet fragment dazzled Spain and Portugal's skies, and Blue Origin launched its first crew to space since 2022, including Ed Dwight, the oldest person in space. The U.S. health regulator has allowed billionaire Elon Musk's Neuralink to implant its brain chip in a second person after it proposed to fix a problem that occurred in its first patient, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. Earlier this month, Neuralink said tiny wires implanted in the brain of its first patient had pulled out of position. Reuters reported last week, citing sources, the company knew from animal testing that the wires might retract. Comet fragment lights up sky over Spain and Portugal 'like a movie' A bright comet fragment lit up the skies over parts of Spain and Portugal late on Saturday, according to the European Space Agency (ESA), with one Lisbon resident saying the dazzling display "felt like a movie...

Our galaxy is a jewel box of red stars. More than 70% of the stars in the Milky Way are M dwarfs, also known as red dwarfs. These stars are cool and dim compared with our Sun, but they often blast orbiting exoplanets with high-energy radiation, especially early in their lives. And those ‘‘lives’’ last a long time. Stars like our Sun burn for about 10 billion years before turning into hungry red giants devouring any planets too nearby. M dwarfs keep burning for 100 billion years or more, perhaps offering a foothold for life, and an even longer window for life to develop. An international team using robotic telescopes around the world recently spotted an Earth-sized planet orbiting an ultra-cool red dwarf, the dimmest and longest-lived of stars. When the universe grows cold and dark, these will be the last stars burning. The Discovery The exoplanet SPECULOOS-3 b is about 55 light-years from Earth (really close when you consider the cosmic scale!) and nearly the same size. A year there, ...

The world’s oceans have gone “crazy haywire,” according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official, with record-high temperatures imperiling coral reefs. Derek Manzello, coordinator of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch Program, said in a news briefing Thursday that around 60.5%, or nearly two-thirds, of the world’s coral reefs have experienced heat stress at levels high enough to cause bleaching, a major health threat. Coral bleaching occurs as a result of abnormal ocean conditions, such as when water temperatures are unusually warm or cold, or when oceans are more acidic than normal. Corals respond by expelling tiny photosynthetic algae that live in their tissues, causing the normally colorful marine invertebrates to turn ghostly white. The current threats come on the heels of record-shattering marine heat waves that hit most of the world’s ocean basins last year. Manzello said that conditions last year were so unusually warm in parts of the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea and...