The primitive man in the cave.; 3d render For Snapshot – picture from istock/getty images | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto A set of ancient wooden spears may be younger than scientists thought and wielded by Neanderthals instead of their ancestors. The complete spears made of spruce and pine are among the oldest known hunting weapons. … Read more
A Mount Augustus snail laying an egg through its neck in Hokitika, New Zealand. | Photo Credit: AFP The strange reproductive habits of a large, carnivorous New Zealand snail were once shrouded in mystery. Now footage of the snail laying an egg from its neck has been captured for the first time, the country’s conservation … Read more
Eggs are less likely to crack when they fall on their side, according to experiments with over 200 eggs. What does this mean for the best way to crack an egg for breakfast? Not much, since a break around the middle is the best way to get the golden yolk and runny whites to ooze … Read more
An Earth Observation Satellite (EOS) lifts off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, Andra Pradesh. File | Photo Credit: PTI India will launch an earth observation satellite on Sunday (May 18, 2025) from the spaceport at Sriharikota, boosting its surveillance capabilities from space in all weather conditions. A delegation of lawmakers, who are … Read more
Picture a space rock smashing into the moon. It sends splinters of moon rock flying into the dark void of space. What would that spectacle look like? Scientists used the ATLAS telescope in Rio Hurtado, Chile, to discover asteroid 2024 YR4 in December 2024 as a new entrant in the asteroid databases — and it … Read more
Yeast colonies being grown on an agar plate. | Photo Credit: Rainis Venta (CC BY-SA) Researchers at Emory University and the University of Texas Health Science Centre, both in the US, have found that a class of mutations that leads to serious developmental disabilities in human babies has similar effects in budding yeast, a simpler … Read more
The origins of human music are obscure because of the many contexts in which it could have arisen and for a variety of purposes. Archaeologists have found musical instruments among the remains of Egyptian and Indus civilisation sites as well as in similar settlements around the world since the dawn of prehistory. Some theories also … Read more
Venera-4 model at the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, similar to the reentering spacecraft Kosmos 482. It was part of a series of missions bound for Venus, but never made it out of Earth’s orbit due to a rocket failure. Photo: https://blogs.esa.int/ A Soviet-era spacecraft plunged to Earth on Saturday (May 10, 2025), more than a … Read more
The Australian election is over, and the centre-left Labor Party has been re-elected. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese becomes the first Australian leader in over two decades to secure a second term. As of May 7, with 80% of votes counted and results confirmed in 138 of 150 seats, the outcome is clear: Labor has won … Read more
An artist’s conception of a magnetar in a star cluster. | Photo Credit: ESO/L. Calçada In a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of researchers led by Anirudh Patel of Columbia University has reported that the universe may have another way to produce the precious element gold — which scientists have … Read more
Bunsen, the burner German chemist Robert Bunsen was born on March 30, 1811 in Gottingen. His father taught modern languages at the University of Gottingen and Bunsen too went on to earn his doctorate there. Before he returned to this place as a lecturer, he travelled across Europe for three years. He also taught at … Read more
Asian cultivated rice (Oryza sativa L.) is one of the most important food crops in the world. Representative image. | Photo Credit: Sandy Ravaloniaina/Unsplash Scientists have assembled a first of its kind ‘pangenome’, a kind of reference genome, by stitching together key parts of genomes from 144 varieties of wild and cultivated varieties of rice … Read more
Climate-driven food shortage and undernourishment could affect the composition of the human gut microbiota, exacerbating the effects of climate change on human health, according to a new review article published in The Lancet Planetary Health. The article comes on the heels of a growing number of studies that highlight the key role food and nutrition … Read more
Indian-headed households had the highest median annual income among all Asian groups | Photo Credit: Reuters With a median annual household income exceeding $150,000, Indian Americans top the earnings chart among all Asian groups in the U.S.— about 40% higher than both Chinese and Japanese households. As of 2023, nearly 25 million Asians lived in … Read more
In 2016, when Juan Diego Ibáñez-Álamo at the University of Granada in Spain met Kaspar Delhey, an expert in bird coloration at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, a new collaboration was born. “He suggested we study whether urbanisation is associated with differences in bird coloration,” Delhey said. Many studies have investigated how urban … Read more
ISRO Chairman V. Narayanan addresses a press conference on updates on the Gaganyaan Programme, at the National Media Centre in New Delhi on May 6, 2025. | Photo Credit: ANI The launch of India’s maiden human space flight — Gaganyaan — has been pushed to the first quarter of 2027, nearly five years later than … Read more
A: The increase in core temperature observed during illness is commonly called fever and occurs in response to infection by a pathogen or certain types of physical injury. When a person becomes infected with bacteria, the white blood cells of the immune system recognise the incoming pathogen as foreign and initiate the first stages of … Read more
A group of Haenyeo women on Jeju Island, September 2012. | Photo Credit: Idobi (CC BY-SA) A new study has presented evidence of both genetic adaptation and physiological changes among the Haenyeo, a unique group of women in South Korea’s Jeju Island known for diving up to 10 m underwater and up to seven hours … Read more
Representative purposes. | Photo Credit: DRDO A set of parachutes developed for the first uncrewed mission of India’s Gaganyaan human spaceflight programme was shipped from Agra on Monday (May 5, 2025). The parachutes were developed by the Aerial Delivery Research and Development Establishment (ADRDE), an Agra-based laboratory under the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). … Read more
The Government of India and a clutch of startups have set their sights on creating an indigenous foundational Artificial Intelligence large language model (LLM), along the lines of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Meta’s Llama. Foundational AI, or LLMs, are manually trained systems that can churn out responses to queries. Training them requires large amounts … Read more
The Government of India and a clutch of startups have set their sights on creating an indigenous foundational Artificial Intelligence large language model (LLM), along the lines of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Meta’s Llama. Foundational AI, or LLMs, are manually trained systems that can churn out responses to queries. Training them requires large amounts … Read more
Daily Quiz | On Space Firsts 1 / 7 | Who was the first woman in space in 1963? 2 / 7 | What first was achieved on November 3, 1957? Answer : The dog Laika, the first living creature, was launched into space by USSR DID YOU KNOW THE ANSWER? YES NO SHOW ANSWER … Read more
The cause of last week’s massive power outage in Spain and Portugal remains unclear but it has shone a spotlight on solar and wind energy, which critics accuse of straining electricity grids. The rise of renewables presents a challenge for power grids, which must evolve to adapt as countries move away from fossil fuels. Maintaining … Read more
(1) Donald Trump celebrates 100 days in office U.S. President Donald Trump spent his first 100 days issuing a blitz of executive orders to deliver rapidly on campaign pledges, drastically downsize the government and reshape America’s role on the global stage. Donald Trump promised on Tuesday (April 29, 2025) that he is just getting started … Read more
From breathtaking snapshots of distant galaxies to game-changing discoveries about the universe’s expansion, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has dazzled humankind for 35 years. After launching on April 24, 1990, Hubble overcame early flaws to become one of NASA’s greatest triumphs. Its vivid images and countless scientific breakthroughs have reshaped our understanding of the cosmos, … Read more
Image used for representational purpose. | Photo Credit: S.R. Raghunathan The story so far: The office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India, Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the Centre for Technology, Innovation, and Economic Research have released a detailed assessment of public-funded research and development in India. In all, 244 … Read more
In his 1997 book ‘Dominance Without Hegemony’, historian Ranajit Guha recounted how Mahatma Gandhi, “perhaps India’s foremost ideologue of self-discipline”, created an “elaborate” set of rules about how people should behave around him as they travelled the country. To Gandhi, Guha wrote, a haphazard crowd was “unmanageable”, “uncontrollable”, “undisciplined”, and ultimately entailed a “mobocracy”. Gandhi … Read more
The Voyager 1 spacecraft was 25 billion km away in February, somewhere in the outer edge of the solar system. It’s the farthest a human-made spacecraft has gone from the earth. The hope is that in the distant future, a human astronaut will be able to go where Voyager 1 has been — a journey … Read more
The Central government’s plans in the Nicobar Islands, especially land taken over for deforestation, will affect the native Shompen tribe, which needs forests for its livelihood. | Photo Credit: Public domain The famous tree crusader and tree lover Shri ‘Vanajeevi’ Ramaiah who passed away last month was a firm believer that trees are vital for … Read more
Fishers venture out to fish in mechanised boats in Mandapam North Sea, June 16, 2023, after the end of the 61-day fishing ban. | Photo Credit: Balachandar L./The Hindu The total allowable catch (TAC) is a limit on the total quantity of fish that fishers can catch in a particular area. It’s usual for agencies … Read more