Dr Harsh K Gupta remembers the sequence of events that led to the establishment of Dakshin Gangotri, India’s first permanent research station in Antarctica, as if it happened yesterday. A year after he had moved to Thiruvananthapuram as director of the Centre for Earth Science Studies in 1982, a call for proposals to carry out … Read more
Watch: Explained: All about India’s new nuclear energy bill
Today’s Cache | Demand heats up for Nvidia’s H200 chips | Photo Credit: REUTERS Demand heats up for Nvidia’s H200 chips Nvidia is looking into the possibility of increasing its production capacity due to rising demand for its H200 AI chips, according to unnamed sources. The news comes after U.S. President Donald Trump gave permission … Read more
Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and others during the University of Liverpool United Kingdom’s event to announce Bengaluru’s first foreign university campus. | Photo Credit: The Hindu The University of Liverpool has begun work on its proposed Bengaluru campus with a ground-breaking ceremony held at Alembic City on Monday. The campus, which is scheduled to begin operations … Read more
Wasps have a great potential to be beneficial insects and can play a larger ecological role in controlling pests, said Raghavendra Gadagkar, professor and National Science Chair, Centre for Ecological Sciences, IISc. | Photo Credit: file photo Wasps have a great potential to be beneficial insects and can play a larger ecological role in controlling … Read more
Ambassador and Permanent Representative of India to UNESCO in Paris, Vishal V. Sharma during his visit to INCOIS on Monday. Seen here are INCOIS director T. M. Balakrishnan Nair and senior scientist E. Pattabhi Ramarao. | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT Ambassador and Permanent Representative of India to UNESCO in Paris, Vishal V. Sharma visited the … Read more
A: The wisdom teeth are the third molars that sit at the very back of the jaw. They usually start forming in the teens and try to erupt in the late teens to the mid-20s, hence the name ‘wisdom’. We have wisdom teeth because of our ancestors, whose lives demanded more chewing to get through. … Read more
On successive weekends in November, hundreds of Delhi residents gathered at India Gate holding placards saying “I miss breathing” and “right to live, not just survive”. Winter’s onset once again plunged the National Capital Region into a dense smog, with the air quality index refusing to exit the ‘severe’ (301-400) or ‘very poor’ (201-300) levels. … Read more
External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar addresses a conference on ’50 Years of the Biological Weapons Convention: Strengthening Bio-security for the Global South’, in New Delhi on December 1. | Photo Credit: PTI The story so far: New age biotechnologies endow powers to understand biology better and, consequently, harness biological agents to target humans. Thus, biosecurity … Read more
On December 8, economic historian Joel Mokyr delivered his lecture in Stockholm as part of the ceremony in which he received his share of the special Nobel Prize for economics, for “having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress”. His talk recapitulated his long-standing argument that a self-reinforcing relationship between science and technology … Read more
What fuels landfill fires and is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period? The answer is methane. While it is an excellent fuel for kitchen stoves, CNG vehicles, and power plants, it is also busy burning the planet. Methane is generated naturally by decomposing organic matter. The same prehistoric processes that … Read more
In the late 1960s, at the height of the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese government was facing a serious crisis. It was losing more soldiers to malaria than to the war itself. Chloroquine, the antimalarial drug used for decades, had lost its effectiveness because Plasmodium falciparum, the malaria parasite, had become resistant to it. Desperate for … Read more
For millions battling infertility, the effortless miracle of procreation is a punishing ordeal of tests, treatments and trials, often chipping away not just at their finances, but also their sense of self. Researching embryos and embryo-like models is therefore critical to peering into the earliest moments of human development to understand why conceptions fail. A … Read more
Titas Chanda (left) and Sthitadhi Roy. | Photo Credit: International Centre for Theoretical Physics The 2025 ICTP Prize has been awarded to Titas Chanda of IIT-Madras and Sthitadhi Roy of the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Bengaluru, the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) has said. A statement said the award “recognises the winners’ exceptional … Read more
Image used for representational purposes. File | Photo Credit: Reuters ISRO has lined up seven launch missions by March next year, including one to demonstrate home-built electric propulsion systems for satellite and quantum key distribution technologies, and the first uncrewed mission of the Gaganyaan project. The first of the seven launches is expected to take … Read more
Given so much of the world’s population lives along coasts, mangroves’ functions directly benefit many people. | Photo Credit: Getty Images Saltwater would kill most plants, but it cannot fell the ancient mangroves species distinct for their giant stilt roots. So how do they survive on brine? International researchers and authors of a new paper … Read more
Kerala local body elections 2025: One of the counting centers in Thiruvananthapuram. | Photo Credit: A. Jayamohan The counting of votes for the high-stakes Kerala local body elections began at 8 a.m. on Saturday (December 13, 2025), with early trends pointing to a close contest between the ruling Left Democratic Front (LDF) and the Opposition … Read more
Kerala local body elections 2025: One of the counting centers in Thiruvananthapuram. | Photo Credit: A. Jayamohan The counting of votes for the high-stakes Kerala local body elections began at 8 a.m. on Saturday (December 13, 2025), with early trends pointing to a close contest between the ruling Left Democratic Front (LDF) and the Opposition … Read more
Achal Agrawal, founder of India Research Watch. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement Achal Agrawal founded the India Research Watch (IRW) after his observations of grave academic misconduct in India. Dr. Agrawal, now a freelance data scientist in Raipur, told scientific journal Nature how shocked he was when a student spoke casually of using software to … Read more
Visual: Max Born was the maternal grandfather of this celebrated musician and actor. Name her. | Photo Credit: Eva Rinaldi Q: Max Born was the maternal grandfather of this celebrated musician and actor. Name her. A: Olivia Newton-John Q: Max Born made many contributions to quantum theory. This said, he was awarded the Nobel Prize … Read more
As India moves closer to flying astronauts as part of Gaganyaan, human-rating has emerged as a central but oft-unseen part of the story. Launch vehicles like LVM-3 already fly satellites safely but carrying people demands a lower tolerance for risk and a different way of thinking about failure. What’s the definition of human-rating? Human-rating is … Read more
Displaced Sudanese who fled El-Fasher after the city fell to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) rest in the camp located on the southwestern edge of Tawila Sudan’s economy has contracted sharply since the civil war broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on April 15, 2023. Its GDP, … Read more
A golden apple snail climbing the edge of a lotus leaf in a pond. | Photo Credit: Special arrangement In Hindu mythology, Lord Shiva’s third eye is said to open only in moments of great transformation. What if this isn’t just a mythic symbol of cosmic vision but also a metaphor for renewal? Ever wondered … Read more
This illustration provided by NASA depicts the MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) spacecraft orbiting the planet Mars. | Photo Credit: AP NASA has lost contact with a spacecraft that has orbited Mars for more than a decade. Also Read | MAVEN beams first images from Martian atmosphere Maven abruptly stopped communicating with ground stations … Read more
There’s at least one space race already underway to get to the moon. There’s also another one: to claim radio frequencies and orbital slots in the limited space around the earth. The main participants of this race are companies launching large fleets of satellites working together, called megaconstellations. These megaconstellations are already revolutionising Internet access … Read more
Earlier this month, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, professor Aninda Sinha and his former doctoral student Faizan Bhat linked the esoteric mathematics of Srinivasa Ramanujan with the principles underlying the physics of turbulent fluids and the expansion of the universe. The bridge they laid was π (pi) — not the humble one but the transcendental … Read more
When heating water in a microwave, avoid overlong heating and be careful when adding anything to it. | Photo Credit: Dewang Gupta/Unsplash A: Water has a property called surface tension: its surface behaves like a stretched skin that tries to shrink. When a vapour bubble forms inside hot water, surface tension tends to squeeze it. … Read more
The western tragopan (Tragopan melanocephalus) is one of India’s rarest pheasants and the state bird of Himachal Pradesh. It was once found across parts of Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, and Uttarakhand, but now survives in small fragmented pockets. Studies in the forests of Kazinag and Limber in Jammu & Kashmir have revealed that while … Read more
A car burns during a wildfire in Meda, Portugal, August 15, 2025. | Photo Credit: Reuters This year is set to be the world’s second or third-warmest on record, potentially surpassed only by 2024’s record-breaking heat, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on December 9. The data is the latest from C3S … Read more
