If there’s one thing that keeps Dr. Srimathy Kesan going, it is her “unwavering desire to create a platform for girls who are curious about space exploration and deep tech”. The CEO and founder of Space Kidz India, a Chennai-based aerospace and defence start-up pioneering in the launch of small satellites and spacecraft, is all … Read more
Science can be fascinating if you approach it the right way. Here, children listen carefully as a volunteer explains at the Quantum century exhibition at the Government College for Women in Thiruvananthapuram. | Photo Credit: NIRMAL HARINDRAN The scientific method is a mathematical and experimental technique that is used in sciences to build a hypothesis … Read more
Every year, mosquito-borne diseases kill more than 6 lakh people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. | Photo Credit: Getty Images Between 1992 and 2020, a group of intrepid scientists walked deep into the forests of Sundaland, across the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Java, and Borneo, to collect mosquito larvae of 11 species to understand … Read more
Everyone knows scientists are in the business of “discovering” things. But what exactly do they do? When I was growing up in a small village in Kerala, there were no scientists around to ask this question. Even now, my friends ask me this question, half joking, half curious. I often laugh it off and change … Read more
Saranya J.S., climate researcher. Saranya J.S., a native of Tanur in Malappuram, has been selected for the prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (MSCA) instituted and funded by the European Commission. The highly competitive two-year fellowship will support her project titled “Indian Ocean Warming Pattern, Surface and Subsurface Marine Heatwaves: Storylines and Mechanisms (IO-WAVE)”, to be carried out in France. Ms. … Read more
According to the Forest Department, the park is equipped with three advanced telescopes for structured sky-watching sessions and solar panels to power onsite operations sustainably. | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT The Tamil Nadu government on Thursday announced the launch of the State’s first Dark Sky Park at the Ariyur Shola Reserve Forest in Kolli Hills, … Read more
NASA’s Artemis II SLS moon rocket with the Orion spacecraft slowly rolls back towards the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center on February 25, 2026. | Photo Credit: AP The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) added a new mission to its Artemis moon programme involving a spacecraft docking test in Earth’s orbit … Read more
Ageing is a major risk factor for most neurological and psychiatric disorders. As populations worldwide continue to grow older, the burden of brain- and cognition-related disorders is expected to rise substantially. There is, therefore, an urgent need to understand the normal trajectory of brain ageing and to develop scientific methods that can determine and predict … Read more
A venerable institution, facing accusations of opacity, decided to stun its detractors with some transparency. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) made public the report of a technical committee, constituted to analyse why the NVS-02 satellite, which was launched aboard a GSLV rocket on January 29, 2025, could not be placed in its intended orbit. … Read more
For representative purposes. | Photo Credit: Getty Images The story so far: Carbon Capture and Utilisation (CCU) refers to a set of technologies that capture carbon dioxide emissions from industrial sources or directly from the air and convert them into useful products. This process removes carbon from the atmosphere and puts it into the economy … Read more
The Russia-Ukraine war, which began with Russia’s invasion four years ago, on February 24, 2022, has continued despite thousands of casualties and numerous rounds of peace negotiations. A joint report by the World Bank, European Union (EU), United Nations, and Ukraine, published on February 23, estimates the cost of post-war construction in Ukraine to be around … Read more
While upper castes form a modest share of the electorate, their cohesion and concentration in key States enhance their influence | Photo Credit: THULASI KAKKAT In recent weeks, there have been debates and protests in universities across India over the University Grants Commission (UGC) (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026, designed to … Read more
Early this year, when Craig, one of Africa’s “super tusker” elephants, died in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park, tributes poured in from across the world. Photographs of his very large ivory tusks, nearly brushing the ground as he walked with Mount Kilimanjaro in the background, resurfaced online. Tourists shared memories of sightings and safari guides recalled … Read more
‘National Science Day should become an annual day of discussion of what counts as science, including the work of technicians, field staff, nurses, lab attendants, data collectors, and others whose labour is essential to make new knowledge but is rarely commemorated.’ Photo: dst.gov.in Every February 28, India celebrates National Science Day to commemorate C.V. Raman’s … Read more
The NVS-02 navigation satellite set to aboard the launch vehicle GSLV-F15, from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) in Sriharikota on January 29, 2025. | Photo Credit: ANI After nearly a year’s delay, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) made public the report of a committee constituted to analyse why the NVS-02 satellite, which was … Read more
Prime Minister Narendra Modi greets as he emplanes for a two-day visit to Israel, in New Delhi on Wednesday. | Photo Credit: ANI Prime Minister Narendra Modi landed in Israel on Wednesday to review with his counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu, the India-Israel Strategic Partnership and to discuss further opportunities in various areas of cooperation, including science … Read more
In the flower bud, new organs begin as small bumps on a ring of tissue, and the petal number is equal to the number of slots this tissue lays down in a whorl. | Photo Credit: Jei Lee/Unsplash — Ajith Kizhakkethil Many flowers are indeed pentamerous — but across flowering plants as a whole, the … Read more
A waste picker drinks water while working during a heat wave at a garbage dump on the outskirts of Jammu, June 19, 2024. | Photo Credit: AP The natural El Nino cycle, which warps weather worldwide, is both adding to and shaped by a warming world, meteorologists said. A new study calculated that an unusual … Read more
Aliens are real. Or maybe not. The possibility of mystical beings watching over us or even walking among us is not just the ramblings of the fringe and Reddit users, but a key political and societal debate in the U.S. President Donald Trump, on Thursday, February 19, 2026, announced that he was directing the Pentagon … Read more
The science of taste The Miracle Berry contains a compound called miraculin that binds to sweet receptors and can make acidic foods like lemon taste sweet for about an hour. START THE QUIZ 1 / 5 | You don’t ‘taste’ most of what you call taste. Instead, a large share of the flavour comes from … Read more
Mathematicians have announced a milestone in the effort to thoroughly verify the solution of the sphere-packing problem — for which the Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska won the Fields Medal in 2022 — using a machine. This version of the problem asks what the best way is to pack a bunch of spheres in eight dimensions. … Read more
When Isaac Newton wrote Opticks, published in 1704, he divided the colour spectrum into the now famous VIBGYOR, a set of seven colours (the decision was not, as such, scientific because Newton’s choice was dictated by ‘7’ being a significant number in alchemy.) What Newton observed was a series of hues merging into one another, … Read more
In a 1953 experiment, two scientists named Stanley Miller and Harold Urey attempted to recreate the conditions of the early earth long before life existed. They showed that organic molecules such as amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, could form spontaneously in the conditions that prevailed on a primitive earth, 3.5-4 billion years ago. … Read more
In 1987, four years after the discovery of HIV as the causative agent of AIDS, scientists reported the first drug effective against the virus, called zidovudine. Zidovudine targeted a viral enzyme called reverse transcriptase, and prevented the virus from completing its life-cycle. However, zidovudine was no magic bullet. It could hold the virus at bay … Read more
Hand preference reflects how the brain organises movement control | Photo Credit: Kelly Sikkema/Unsplash — Gayatri Chandrashekar A: There’s a neural basis for handedness but it’s not due to any single part of the brain. Hand preference reflects how the brain organises movement control. In most right-handed people, the left hemisphere has stronger control over … Read more
The story so far: India and Brazil signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on rare earths and critical minerals during President Lula da Silva’s state visit to India on February 21, 2026. The joint statement said the two countries want to work together across the full mineral “value chain” and that the understanding includes exploration, … Read more
(1) U.S. Supreme Court rules against President Trump’s tariffs The U.S. Supreme Court ruled President Donald Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs illegal on Friday last week (February 20, 2026), calling them an overreach of Presidential authority using a law meant for national emergencies. The verdict came in a 6-3 ruling. Following the verdict, the President imposed … Read more
In many animals, sex is decided by obvious physical differences in the chromosomes. But in ants, bees, and wasps, sex is often decided in a more unusual way: by whether an embryo carries two different versions of a specific DNA region or two matching ones. Two studies, one in Science Advances in 2024 and the … Read more
“Scientists have long known that emotional states such as stress and anxiety can influence the intensity of these sensations. While the neural mechanisms linking stress and pain have been studied extensively, the effect of stress on itch has remained poorly understood,” IISc said. File | Photo Credit: The Hindu Researchers at the Indian Institute of … Read more
A committee that includes K. VijayRaghavan, former Principal Scientific Advisor, and S. Somanath, former Chairman, India Space Research Organisation (ISRO), will probe “systemic issues” underlying the successive failures of ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV). While technical committees probe and submit ‘failure analysis reports’ when mishaps occur, this committee, The Hindu has reliably learnt, will … Read more