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In a landmark paper in Science on May 20, 1983, researchers reported they had isolated a “retrovirus” from a patient at risk of developing AIDS. The work, led by French virologists Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier at the Institut Pasteur, was the first glimpse of what would become one of the most devastating pathogens in … Read more

Scientists have solved the mystery of 3.4 million-year-old fossils called the “Burtele Foot” discovered in Ethiopia in 2009, finding they belonged to an enigmatic human ancestor that lived alongside another closely related species during a poorly understood time in human evolution. Based on the recent discovery nearby of 25 teeth and the jawbone of a … Read more

A worker prepares brooms from bamboo at a roadside shop in Ahmedabad on November 28, 2025. | Photo Credit: AFP Scientists conducting a field survey in Manipur’s Imphal West district have discovered fossil evidence indicating that thorniness in bamboo was already present in Asia during the Ice Age, a government release said. Researchers from the … Read more

The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced that it has secured a record budget of 22.1 billion euros to fund its programmes for the next three years, as the continent seeks greater independence in space. The ESA also approved a plan to bolster defence cooperation and laid out plans for scientific space missions at a … Read more

Astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla speakng at an interaction in Bengaluru. | Photo Credit: PTI Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla has said the next five to 10 years are going to be defining times for India as far as space exploration is concerned, as a lot of things are going to happen. In an interactive session on the … Read more

A data scientist must consider societal impact, not just model accuracy.  | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto In the rapidly evolving field of Data Science, technical skills such as programming, statistics, and machine learning are often emphasised as the foundation for success. However, while these are essential, they are not sufficient on their own. A successful … Read more

What with near-instant delivery of whatever food item that we seek — be it ready-to-eat or even to prepare — and supermarkets around every corner in an urban expanse, it might not be long before the need to preserve food at home becomes a forgotten art. And yet, home-food preservation was a tricky affair even … Read more

The Scientists for Genetic Diversity, a group of scientists, has written to Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav, and the Director General of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research M. L. Jat expressing its concern over the “compromise proposal” presented at the 11th session of the governing body (GB11) of … Read more

Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft blasting off the launch pad at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. | Photo Credit: AFP The Baikonur cosmodrome is a spaceport in Kazakhstan that Russia leases and operates as the site of its space launches. It was built in the 1950s first as a missile test range before becoming the centre of … Read more

India produces a large amount of sugarcane. | Photo Credit: Getty Images A recent paper by Olivier Garsmeur and colleagues titled ‘The genomic footprints of wild Saccharum species trace domestication, diversification, and modern breeding of sugarcane’ in the journal Cell conducted genomic analyses of 390 sugarcane breeds from Australia, Brazil, China, France, French Polynesia, India, … Read more

“During this phase, the science orbit will be maintained via regular manoeuvres, scheduled to avoid or minimise conflicts with science observations. Extensive calibration and validation activities will take place,” the ISRO had said earlier. File | Photo Credit: NASA via PTI The NASA ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) satellite, launched in July, has entered the … Read more

A prototype of the MATSYA 6000, a submersible made by Chennai’s National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT). | Photo Credit: Ravindran R. A crucial set of tests on the Samudrayaan, India’s first manned-submersible dive into the ocean, is likely only mid-next year following a delay in the procurement of syntactic foam cladding from France. The … Read more

Chinese and U.S. flags flutter outside the building of an American company in Beijing, China | Photo Credit: TINGSHU WANG China lent more than $2 trillion in loans and grants to over 80% of countries and regions in the world between 2000 and 2023. The U.S. was the biggest beneficiary, according to data released by … Read more

Having failed to force a retraction, Beijing escalated the issue to the United Nations | Photo Credit: Andrew Cabello Reynolds Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi sparked a controversy when she said that a Chinese assault on Taiwan could be deemed a “survival-threatening situation” — a legal justification allowing Tokyo to exercise collective self-defence. China claims … Read more

The effects of feminising gender-affirmative hormone therapy (GAHT) are more than skin deep, new research in Nature Medicine has reported, with the changes going down to the very proteins circulating in a person’s blood. University of Melbourne endocrinologist Ada Cheung, who co-led the study, has called the findings “a world-first”. Sanjay Kalra, an endocrinologist and … Read more

Protonemata grown by spore germination on BCDAT medium. (This article forms a part of the Science for All newsletter that takes the jargon out of science and puts the fun in! Subscribe now!) How far can plant life be pushed in harsh environments? Climate change as much as humans’ plans for colonies on the moon … Read more

On November 26, a fire started on scaffolding at the Wang Fuk Court housing complex in Tai Po in Hong Kong and spread rapidly across multiple high-rise blocks wrapped in bamboo and other flammable external materials. At least 44 people had died as of 7 am IST (November 27) while hundreds were missing. The local … Read more

Imagine watching the brain not as a finished organ but as a city under construction, where every neuron is a worker changing jobs as the skyline rises. A series of papers in Nature published on November 5 has captured exactly that. Led by researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in the USA, together … Read more

China has finished building its Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), a bittersweet development given that the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) has been in limbo for years. Both JUNO and INO were designed to study subatomic particles called neutrinos, which are very hard to catch because they rarely interact with matter. This is why both INO … Read more

The crisis has been described by UNCTAD as the most severe economic crisis ever recorded, wiping out 69 years of human development. File | Photo Credit: AFP Gaza’s economy experienced an 83% decline in 2024, pushing all 2.3 million residents into poverty. This followed months of bombardment in military actions carried out by Israel, which … Read more

File photo of the Google logo. | Photo Credit: Reuters Thousands of users across India found themselves abruptly locked out of Google Meet calls after what appears to have been a wide-scale service disruption. Reports clustered around error messages and “502 — Bad Gateway” notifications, with many users unable to access meetings. The outage struck … Read more

The location of ‘Krishnan’ crater and nearby features | Photo Credit: Special arrangement A 3.5 billion-old crater on Mars will henceforth be known after M.S. Krishnan, the pioneering Indian geologist. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has approved it and several other names for Martian landforms proposed by two Kerala-based researchers. Apart from ‘Krishnan,’ the IAU … Read more