Monisha Ravisetti
Reporter, Life Sciences and Physical Sciences
@monisharavisMonisha Ravisetti, based in New York, covers Life Sciences and Physical Sciences for The Academic Times. Prior to that, Monisha worked at Weill Cornell Medical College, Mount Sinai West and NYU Langone conducting clinical and basic science research. She graduated with a degree focused in philosophy, physics and chemistry from New York University, and her work investigates the intersection between science and the human condition.
Addressing the terrors that COVID-19 continues to inflict on developing and overpopulated countries, particularly India, scientists designed a portable deep-learning system that is built with inexpensive and easy-to-use equipment and tests for infection in real time.
Long-term tissue-storage facilities are DNA museums that freeze biological data in time, and scientists have conducted the first study to confirm how cold the freezers need to be to prevent losing this invaluable and unique history.
The death toll from the decades-long U.S. opioid crisis continues to climb as the toxic drugs are still used to treat chronic pain, but scientists have hit a milestone in developing an innovative alternative that involves inhibiting the body's pain-encoding gene.
Classical computers cannot unlock the quantum domain, so scientists rely on makeshift simulations to study the elusive field — and these programs are soon to reach another level of realism with the discovery of a new way to observe long-distance interactions between lithium atoms, stand-ins for quantum particles.
Physicists from institutions including Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the European Southern Observatory found that a supermassive black hole awakened to devour a nearby star much like its more ordinary counterparts would, indicating that, despite their vast nature, the objects are rather predictable in at least one regard.
The forbidden gap of a photonic crystal is the ideal area to safely isolate a single photon or electron, which can be used to store quantum information. On the flip side, however, the gap is a victim of its own perfection because humans have been locked out, too — until now.
In the largest-ever study of artificial insemination in sharks, scientists overnighted the animals' semen to U.S. aquariums across state borders and successfully impregnated 20 females that subsequently birthed 97 pups, including some from rare asexual "virgin births."
The same star that pleasantly brightens each day also ejects fiery plasma into the universe, catapulting particles toward Earth and endangering satellites and astronauts in orbit, and researchers recently provided the first direct evidence of how the sun's solar wind scatters these electrons in space.
Low Earth orbit is reaching capacity as tech companies such as SpaceX, OneWeb and Amazon race to industrialize space with satellites, and in response, physicists are attempting to lay out safe and affordable options for expanding the market into medium Earth orbit, a much riskier arena. A new study conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that use of marijuana in e-cigarettes at least once varies by racial group among U.S. youth, highlighting the importance of equitable implementation of health education and targeted intervention strategies against vaping as it becomes increasingly common.