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Science quiz: Tinkering with storms Visual: Name this 1947 hurricane that became the subject of controversy after its sharp turn to the northeast, into Florida, was blamed on cloud-seeding. START THE QUIZ 1 / 6 | Name this 1947 hurricane that became the subject of controversy after its sharp turn to the northeast, into Florida, … Read more

Ion chromatography, or the process of separating ions from a sample by passing it through a long column, is usually carried out in a laboratory using expensive, sophisticated equipment. Now, scientists at the University of Tasmania in Australia have devised a simpler way to perform the technique out in the field — one that could … Read more

While pigments interact with light and their surroundings to produce specific colours, the hex triplet #1099D6 (shown) approximates what manganese blue might have looked like. | Photo Credit: Google Jackson Pollock’s Number 1A, 1948 is one of the most famous examples of action painting, where paint is dripped, splashed, and layered onto a surface. While … Read more

A Kanizsa triangle. | Photo Credit: Fibonacci (CC BY-SA) A: Our brains fall for optical illusions because of the ways in which they perceive the world, including using contextual information, shortcuts, and predictions. Among other patterns, the brain assumes light comes from above, fills missing edges, and exaggerates contrasts. While these tricks help us navigate … Read more

Ice is almost everywhere on the earth — in glaciers, snow, and clouds. Despite being so common, it still hides mysteries about its physical properties. A long-standing puzzle concerns its electrical behaviour. Every water molecule is polar, meaning it has a positive and a negative end. But when water freezes into ordinary hexagonal ice (known … Read more

Examples of Early and Middle Holocene human burials from southern China. This figure shows six human burials from Huiyaotian in Nanning and Liyupo in Long’an, both shell-midden sites located in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. | Photo Credit: PNAS 122 (38) e2515103122 Archaeologists working in southeast Asia have long been puzzled by pre-farming burials dating … Read more

While pigments interact with light and their surroundings to produce specific colours, the hex triplet #1099D6 (shown) approximates what manganese blue might have looked like. | Photo Credit: Google Jackson Pollock’s Number 1A, 1948 is one of the most famous examples of action painting, where paint is dripped, splashed, and layered onto a surface. While … Read more

These days, an inky, sightless night is a rare sight in much of the world. From the harsh glare of streetlamps that make us squint to the gaudy flicker of neon billboards that force sunglass shields, artificial light is blurring the line between day and night. This has meant birds stay active for almost an … Read more

In a small persimmon orchard in northern Greece, scientists carefully open paper bags to release thousands of flies, in an experiment aimed at blunting the destructive impact of new invasive species. The insects are sterile male Mediterranean fruit flies (Ceratitis capitata), a pest that annually causes significant damage to crops in Naousa, where a large … Read more

(1) Death toll rises to 72 in Nepal in last week’s unrest Authorities in Nepal have raised the death toll from last week’s unrest to 72 as search teams recover bodies from government offices, houses and other buildings set on fire during the anti-corruption protests, the Health Ministry said on Sunday (September 14, 2025). In … Read more

In 1905, German physician and microbiologist Robert Koch was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for his investigations and discoveries in relation to tuberculosis.” At a time when TB claimed millions of lives, Koch’s identification of Mycobacterium tuberculosis as the causative agent transformed medical science and confirmed that the disease was infectious, not … Read more

The U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) calls mosquitoes the “world’s deadliest animals”. They have good reason. Small, annoying but dangerous: this disease-carrying insect helps kill more than a million people in the world every year. Now, as the world becomes warmer, their domain could be expanding. Previously, mosquitoes were only a concern … Read more

The story so far: The Supreme Court, in Kattavellai @ Devakar v. State of Tamil Nadu, recently issued guidelines to maintain the integrity of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) samples in criminal cases. The court directed the Director Generals of Police of all States to prepare sample forms of the Chain of Custody Register and all other necessary documentation … Read more

A regulator has approved a world-first vaccine to protect koalas from chlamydia infections, which are causing infertility and death in the iconic native species that is listed as endangered in parts of Australia. The single-dose vaccine was developed by the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland state after more than a decade of research … Read more

Fashion is a part of our lives, we breathe it every day. Look around, and you’ll find garment stores everywhere: from small roadside stalls to giant malls, from local shops to global brands. Fashion never goes out of trend. But have you heard of the term fast fashion? Let’s find out what it means. What … Read more

Is Science the only route to getting into high-growth careers these days? Contrary to popular belief, it is not. The world isn’t divided into Science vs. everything else anymore. From apps that track climate change to the psychology behind user-friendly design, today’s problems need minds that are creative, analytical, and tech-aware, regardless of whether they … Read more

In 1994, a landmark paper in Science reported the isolation of an antibody called b12from an HIV-infected individual. The study showed that while pooled plasma containing billions of antibodies from HIV patients could neutralise viruses isolated from only 3 of 12 patients, b12 alone achieved similar neutralisation in 8 of the 12, and that, with … Read more

Science quiz: Most powerful non-nuclear bombs  A railgun runs a strong electric current through parallel rails, using the resuting electromagnetic forces to accelerate a projectile to extreme speeds. START THE QUIZ 1 / 5 | Eighteen years ago, Russia tested a weapon it called the “Father of All Bombs.” It was a ___________ weapon because … Read more

Solar System in the galaxy illustration September began with bang with the Full Moon also known as Corn/Harvest moon and a total Lunar Eclipse on September 7 that was visible throughout Asia and Australia and the central and eastern parts of Europe and Africa. Now, get ready for the next half. New Moon: The Moon … Read more

Last month, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology introduced interim measures to tighten controls on ‘rare earth’ mining and processing. The rules are the latest in Beijing’s efforts to centralise oversight of extraction, exports, and refining. While China’s trading partners such as India and the U.S. are seeking alternative sources to reduce dependency, data … Read more

Modern computing banks on conventional electronics and algorithms to process data. But because the hardware operates according to the laws of physics, data processing has a physical speed limit. The availability of power further constrains this speed, especially if the software being run is a power-guzzling artificial intelligence (AI) model. Thus one major preoccupation of … Read more

Material-engineered multicolor luminescent plants (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!) Glow-in-the-dark plants are not new. In fact, scientists created the first bioluminescent plant way back in 1986, when they combined genes from firefly, Photinus pyralis, with … Read more

The first colour image of Mars transmitted by the Viking 1 lander. | Photo Credit: NASA/JPL A: Since the previous century, scientists have been reporting signs of life on Mars. In 1976, a Viking mission experiment reported signs of metabolism but another detector found no organic molecules. In 1996, the meteorite ALH 84001 was presented … Read more

Designer clownfish developed by NBFGR. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement  Scientists at the National Bureau of Fish Genetic Resources (NBFGR) claimed to have developed designer clownfish through cross-breeding of two clownfish species – Amphiprion percula (male) and Amphiprion ocellaris (female). The research findings were published in an article by scientists Ajith Kumar T.T. and P. … Read more

The “Gen Z” protests in Nepal that began as a movement against the ban on social media outlets and corruption on Monday, took a violent turn the next day, with attacks on all institutions. The proximate reasons apart, political instability — marked by frequent changes in government and unethical alliances — has kept Nepal’s stark … Read more