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PHOTO: adventtr/Getty Images What is it? What exactly is a Milankovitch Cycle? Let’s answer this question with another one. What causes climate change? Many known causes are man-made, like the excess burning of fossil fuels, which has led to the high generation of greenhouse gases, emissions made by vehicles and factories, deforestation, etc. Now, these … Read more

The planet’s skies and seas have seen much more than any of us combined, more than the average weather forecast can predict. These rare, questionable phenomena leave not just us baffled, but also meteorologists questioning what is real and what is magic. Let us explore just what more nature is capable of showing us. … Read more

Many of us are familiar with the name Srinivasa Ramanujan and his black and white photograph. He was one of India’s brightest mathematicians. In this episode we dive into his life – from struggling to pass college in Tamil Nadu to reaching the hallowed halls of Cambridge. Ramanujan’s notebooks scribbled with theorems that he discovered … Read more

The Nobel Prize in Physics is being awarded to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced in Stockhom on Tuesday (October 7, 2025). “It is wonderful to be able to celebrate … Read more

Shanchol is the only oral cholera vaccine made in India with WHO prequalification, according to the manufacturers   | Photo Credit: By Arrangement Made in Hyderabad oral cholera vaccine Shanchol, originally developed by Shantha Biotechnics and whose production resumed recently under a new management, has received World Health Organization (WHO) prequalification. For global procurement agencies … Read more

An antibiotic discovered on Easter Island in 1964 sparked a billion-dollar pharmaceutical success story. Yet the history told about this “miracle drug” has completely left out the people and politics that made its discovery possible. Named after the island’s Indigenous name, Rapa Nui, the drug rapamycin was initially developed as an immunosuppressant to prevent organ … Read more

What is a supermoon?

Mary E Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi are awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, on October 6, 2025. | Photo Credit: Reuters The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi for their work on … Read more

Bureaucratic red tape, limited funding, and expensive equipment often conspire to make scientific research in the Global South an uphill task. Yet researchers continue to find creative ways to keep going. At a plenary lecture during the Student Conference on Conservation Science in Bengaluru in September, Sammy Wambua, a conservation genomics scientist from Pwani University … Read more

n this image received on Oct. 6, 2025, Minister of State for Science and Technology (Independent Charge) Jitendra Singh interacts with media at the curtain raiser press conference on Emerging Science, Technology and Innovation Conclave (ESTIC-2025) at National Media Centre, in New Delhi. Photo: PIB via PTI Photo The government’s first ever Emerging Science, Technology … Read more

(1) Madras High Court forms an SIT to probe Karur stampede The Madras High Court constituted a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the stampede in Karur that resulted in 41 deaths during Tamilaga Vetri Kazhagam (TVK) leader Mr. Vijay’s rally last month. The SIT’s constitution, to be headed by Inspector General of Police Asra Garg, … Read more

Mary E. Brunkow (US), Fred Ramsdell (US) and Shimon Sakaguchi (Japan) win Nobel medicine prize. | Photo Credit: Courtesy: https://www.nobelprize.org/ The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi for their work on how immune systems work in determining what should be attacked or protected. … Read more

Mary E. Brunkow (US), Fred Ramsdell (US) and Shimon Sakaguchi (Japan) win Nobel medicine prize. | Photo Credit: Courtesy: https://www.nobelprize.org/ The Nobel Prize for 2025 in Physiology or Medicine goes to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi “for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Monday … Read more

The Nobel Prize for 2025 in Physiology or Medicine goes to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi “for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Monday (October 6, 2025). The laureates identified the immune system’s security guards, regulatory T cells, which prevent immune cells from attacking our … Read more

Known as the “Amazon of the seas”, the Coral Triangle is a 5.7 million sq. km expanse across the tropical waters of Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Solomon Islands, and Timor-Leste — and the richest marine ecosystem on the earth. The Triangle is home to more than three-quarters of the world’s coral species, … Read more

Xenobiology asks whether earthlife is the only possible form of life. | Photo Credit: Warren Umoh/Unsplash Xenobiology is a new and rapidly growing branch of science that studies how life could exist using biological systems different from those that prevail on the earth. The word comes from the Greek for “the study of alien life”. … Read more

The story so far: On September 27, a political rally by actor and Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) founder Vijay in Tamil Nadu’s Karur district ended in a fatal crowd crush in which 41 people were killed. Chief Minister M.K. Stalin appointed a one-person commission headed by retired judge Aruna Jagadeesan to examine the tragedy’s causes. … Read more

For most of us, influenza, or “the flu”, is dismissed as a seasonal nuisance that causes fever, cough, and body aches for a week or so before disappearing. Influenza is far from harmless, however. Worldwide, it’s a major cause of respiratory illness, hospitalisation, and deaths, especially among children, older adults, and people with underlying medical … Read more

We’ve lived through a pandemic, surviving to tell a tale. Ask anyone now, or even decades later, what they remember of the year 2020, and the first thing that would come to their minds, regardless of where they hail from, would be the COVID-19 pandemic. Such was the all-pervasive nature of the disease and the … Read more

On a July morning in 1960, Jane Goodall stepped off a boat onto the shores of Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania. She was 26, untrained by universities, armed only with binoculars, a notebook and patience. What she saw in the forests of Gombe in East Africa altered science itself: chimpanzees who shaped tools, who mourned, who … Read more