The ACC PLI scheme, launched in October 2021, was designed to catalyse a domestic battery manufacturing ecosystem and reduce a near-total reliance on Chinese imports. File image for representation only. | Photo Credit: PTI The story so far: An ambitious ₹18,100 crore scheme to facilitate the manufacture of advanced chemistry cell batteries in India, particularly … Read more
India observes Anti-Leprosy Day on January 30, the death anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. For most of history, leprosy was treated not as a medical condition but as a moral one. Across major religions and ancient traditions, people with leprosy were described as impure, cursed, or unclean. They were made to live outside towns, barred from … Read more
Lawyers for xAI and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment [File] | Photo Credit: REUTERS A U.S. federal judge signaled on Friday she may dismiss a lawsuit by Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI accusing Sam Altman’s rival OpenAI of stealing trade secrets to gain an unfair advantage in developing AI technology. … Read more
ISRO Chairman V. Narayanan. File | Photo Credit: ANI ISRO is working towards the first uncrewed mission of its ambitious Gaganyaan Mission scheduled for 2027, Chairman V. Narayanan has said. The Gaganyaan mission is India’s first human spaceflight programme currently under development. It aims to send a three-member crew on a three-day mission to space … Read more
As India prepares for Budget 2026-27, it must confront a fundamental, yet persistently ignored, constraint on growth: women’s time poverty. Women contribute only about 18% to India’s GDP, not because they work less, but because a large share of their labour remains unpaid and uncounted in national income. About 40% of India’s women are now … Read more
Two rivers meet, and yet, they do not become one. They run side by side, different in colour and texture, divided by a sharp, visible line that seems to defy everything we know about water. After all, place two droplets together and they merge instantly. So how can two massive, fast-moving rivers touch, and still … Read more
On January 25, India observed National Voters’ Day, which aims to promote electoral awareness and encourage informed participation. Close on the heels of the moment, let us take a close look at how voter participation and political behaviour have evolved over the past decade. Lokniti-CSDS survey data offer important insights into the stability of electoral … Read more
It is known that the Indian population, particularly vegetarians, is deficient in vitamin B12. The vitamin essential for the formation of blood cells and the functioning of nerve cells is mainly found in animal-derived food. B12 deficiency during pregnancy has been associated with neural tube defects and poor foetal growth, affecting long-term health. In 1993, … Read more
Solar flares and coronal mass ejections spew material from the sun’s surface into space. | Photo Credit: SOHO/NASA The sun is a giant magnetic ball that goes through roughly 11-year cycles of activity that drive solar flares and space weather that can disrupt satellites and power grids on the earth. But predicting the strength and … Read more
From the historic high of landing on the moon to the recent sobering reality of failed launches and near-misses that have triggered internal reviews, the last five years have been a period of strategic volatility for the Department of Space (DoS). What began as a celebrated era of ‘unlocking’ the sector, marked by the Indian … Read more
The Doomsday Clock, set at 85 seconds to midnight, is displayed during a news conference on January 23 in Washington DC. | Photo Credit: AP On January 27, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has been to the metaphorical point of global catastrophe. … Read more
Space stations, lunar bases, and Mars missions have moved from humans’ imagination to engineering reality. In these environments, innovation emerges through collaboration rather than isolation. Living on the moon or Mars will depend on continuous technological innovation, including on systems that extract water, generate energy and recycle waste and which can adapt to harsh and … Read more
Image used for representational purposes only. File | Photo Credit: Shiv Kumar Pushpakar The Delhi High Court issued notice to the Central Government on Wednesday (January 28, 2026), seeking its stand on a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) challenging the blanket ban on the adoption of frozen embryos. A Bench of Chief Justice D. K. Upadhyaya … Read more
A simple Kagome lattice. The name comes from the Japanese for “basket” and “eye”, referring to the pattern when woven with bamboo leaves. | Photo Credit: N. Mori Helium is famous for making balloons float, voices squeak, and as a critical resource for MRI machines and aerospace engineering. Helium is expensive and scarce, finding leaks … Read more
Science Quiz: On medical disasters 1 / 6 | The drug shown here is created by slightly altering the chemical structure of Y. Name Y, whose use led to a tragedy in the 1950s and 1960s. 2 / 6 | On January 27, 1928, 21 children were inoculated with a diphtheria vaccine in Bundaberg, Australia. … Read more
The stars of the globular cluster NGC 6355, which resides in our Milky Way galaxy’s inner regions are seen in this Hubble Space Telescope image. | Photo Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, E. Noyola, R. – B.R. Sravan The main reason is surface temperature. Stars behave roughly as objects that absorb all incoming radiation and radiate … Read more
In a milestone, India and the European Union (EU) have hailed the conclusion of the India-EU Free Trade Agreement (FTA) while launching a ‘Comprehensive Strategic Agenda’ for 2030. Among other measures, the pact moves beyond supply chains to operationalise joint R&D in advanced semiconductor “heterogeneous integration” and chip design. It also formally links the European … Read more
The hydrogen atom is the lightest in the universe and it consists of the simplest nucleus: a single proton. But while helium is the second-lightest element, its nucleus isn’t the second simplest. That distinction belongs to the deuteron, the nucleus of the deuterium atom, which contains one proton and one neutron. (Deuterium is an isotope … Read more
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist members, from left, Jon B. Wolfsthal, Asha M. George, Steve Fetter and Alexandra Bell, reveal the Doomsday Clock, set to 85 seconds to midnight, during a news conference at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on January 23, 2026, in Washington. | Photo Credit: AP The Bulletin of the … Read more
A kangaroo near White Cliffs, an Outback area in the state of New South Wales, Australia. | Photo Credit: AFP For a long time, biomechanics experts believed that giant, extinct kangaroos were simply too heavy to hop. While the largest modern kangaroos weigh around 90 kg, their prehistoric relatives were much larger and weighed more … Read more
Among the nearly 100 people who died during the U.S. military incursion in Venezuela that led to the abduction of President Nicolas Maduro, there were 32 Cubans who were part of Mr. Maduro’s security detail. Their presence reflects the intricate relations shared between Havana and Caracas. Ever since Venezuela has been ruled by the Bolivarians, … Read more
If there’s a soup of cells and you make them settle down and work together in orderly fashion, you reduce the system’s entropy. | Photo Credit: Bioscience Image Library by Fayette Reynolds Living things dump a lot of heat into their surroundings. The universe is strict about conserving energy. If there’s a soup of cells … Read more
Shruti Kumar (name changed) is a professor at a medical research institute, working on diagnosing a neglected tropical disease that infects almost a million new people every year. Prof. Kumar said that with the increasing number of requests by scientific publishers to peer review research manuscripts in recent years, the process takes so much of … Read more
In a random moment, all energy is lost. | Photo Credit: Unsplash Images In a random moment, all energy is lost. The unstable subject cannot help but decay, slowly but surely, letting go of particles to become stable. It loses itself to become balanced again. This is a radioactive atom’s decay. Warning: Danger ahead Look … Read more
In this screengrab from a video posted on January 26, 2026, President Droupadi Murmu confers India’s highest peacetime gallantry award, Ashoka Chakra, to Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla during the 77th Republic Parade, at Kartavya Path, in New Delhi. Pho(to Credit: YT/@NarendraModi via PTI President Droupadi Murmu on Monday (January 26, 2026) conferred India’s highest peacetime … Read more
Telangana is the richest among major Indian States, with highest per capita income. In 2022-23, the latest year for which data for all States are available, the figure for Telangana stood at ₹3.54 lakh (at current prices). For Karnataka it was ₹3.44 lakh, Haryana ₹3.24 lakh, Gujarat ₹3.1 lakh, Tamil Nadu ₹3.09 lakh, Kerala ₹2.9 … Read more
The story so far: In 2016, under its National Framework for Malaria Elimination in India (2016-2030), India set an ambitious target to eliminate malaria (zero indigenous cases) by 2030, with an interim milestone of interrupting indigenous transmission across the entire country, including all high-transmission States and Union Territories (UT), by 2027. By the end of … Read more
Just retired NASA astronaut Sunita Williams said the upcoming Moon mission under the Artemis programme will give her FOMO (fear of missing out), even while she finds joy exploring Earth and all the places she glimpsed from up there in the sky. On the inaugural evening of the Kerala Literature Festival on Thursday (January 22, … Read more
The World Malaria Report 2025, launched in December, provided a bag of mixed news, five years ahead of the 2030 global malaria elimination deadline. While the reduction in estimated cases in southeast Asia provided definite hope, of serious concern were rising cases of resistance to artemisinin-based frontline treatment for malaria, and falling funding for malaria programmes. Notably, it is the Asia Pacific region that posted much of the good news. The significant reduction was driven by 10 of … Read more
Science quiz: on palaeoclimatology 1 / 6 | What’s the general name for formations like stalactites and stalagmites, which are formed when minerals slowly deposit at one location over a long period? 2 / 6 | An ___ ____ is a cylinder of ice that’s been drilled out of a larger mass. These objects have … Read more