Category: Children

In the late 1930s, in a small corner of Thayyur, Thrissur, a couple had their third girl child, and no one ever predicted that she would later become one of the first Indian women and Malayali to meet the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer. This is the story of T.K Radha. Growing...

If you are a distinguished member of the “I think about extraterrestrial life all the time!” fraternity and don’t know about ‘The Wow!” signal, then you have some catching up to do. E.T Evolved from the ideas of the ‘alien’, the SETI or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is the endeavour — diverse efforts, projects, etc....

A young girl was born in the early 1900s in Kolkata, an era when girls were barely given an education and were often pushed into marriages at a very young age. She, however, stood out and went on to become one of the first Indian women to obtain a postgraduate degree in physics. This is...

Meet D. Indumathi, a physicist who has spent decades exploring some of the universe’s most elusive particles, neutrinos. Recently retired, she built her career in high-energy physics, asking questions that most of us wouldn’t even know how to frame. Physics is often seen as intimidating — abstract, mathematical, distant. But Indumathi approaches it with clarity...

A prodigious student Born on November 7,1888, in Tiruchirapalli, Tamil Nadu, Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman displayed remarkable brilliance from the beginning. As Physics and academia ran in the family (his father, R. Chandrasekhar Iyer, was a lecturer in Physics and Mathematics), he was drawn to Physics. He went on to earn gold medals in his Bachelor’s and...

If there’s one thing that keeps Dr. Srimathy Kesan going, it is her “unwavering desire to create a platform for girls who are curious about space exploration and deep tech”. The CEO and founder of Space Kidz India, a Chennai-based aerospace and defence start-up pioneering in the launch of small satellites and spacecraft, is all...

From childhood inspiration to working at the Institute for Advanced Study — once home to Albert Einstein — she reflects on curiosity, challenges, and uncovering the Sun’s deepest secrets. The Sun is right under our noses, so to speak, and when one thinks of astrophysics, one thinks of more distant celestial objects. What made you curious...

Everyone knows scientists are in the business of “discovering” things. But what exactly do they do? When I was growing up in a small village in Kerala, there were no scientists around to ask this question. Even now, my friends ask me this question, half joking, half curious. I often laugh it off and change...

*Note: The answers are from A to Z (that is, the first question’s answer would start with A, the second one’s with B, so on and so forth. Please note that in case the answer is a person’s name, it would be the last name that would start with the designated letter. Reference image for...

More often than not, in the larger Indian context, students learning science at school follow a formulaic manner of engaging with the subject. There is a strict syllabus, way of learning, way of grading that learning, and even an inquisition that’s tied to viewing science as merely an academic subject. Those of you sitting in...