A long-standing intervention by the Assam government to reduce crop depredation by elephants in its forest regions, piloted and designed by environmental non-government organisation World Wildlife Fund (WWF), is actually associated with more accidental elephant deaths, a study in Conservation Biology has reported. Launched in 2003 in Sonitpur district, the anti-depredation squads (ADS) of Assam...
Category: Science & Tech
UV camera snaps treetops glowing as thunderstorm passed overhead
Thunderstorms create large amounts of electricity that we see as lightning. Under these storms, scientists believed that electricity would flow through trees, giving them a dull ultraviolet glow, and affect the surrounding environment. These discharges are called coronae. However, no one measured these ‘glows’, predicted nearly a century ago, until recently. In a new study...
India’s Project Cheetah must stop importing big cats, say scientists
Last week, nine wild African cheetahs were tranquilised in Botswana’s savannah, quarantined for a few weeks in the country, and then taken on a 10-hour flight over the Indian Ocean by the Indian Air Force to Gwalior. From here, the big cats were flown in helicopters to large quarantine enclosures in Kuno National Park in...
Daily Quiz: On firebombings of World War II
ISRO and ESA sign agreement for Earth Observation missions
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the European Space Agency (ESA) have jointly signed an agreement on ‘ESA-ISRO Arrangement concerning Joint Calibration and Validation Activities and Scientific Studies for Earth Observation Missions’. The agreement was signed on March 4 by M. Ganesh Pillai, scientific secretary, ISRO, and Simonetta Cheli, director, Earth Observation Programme, ESA,...
HALEU-Thorium fuel unsuitable for Indian nuclear reactors: study
Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) researchers have reported that a new kind of nuclear fuel, touted for being able to allow India to take advantage of its vast thorium reserves, will not fit in the country’s three-stage programme and could entail expensive reactor redesigns. The study was published in Current Science. The composition the team...
We now know why some people had severe blood clots after COVID shots
In early 2021, as COVID-19 vaccines were being rolled out across the world, reports began to surface of a rare but alarming complication. Some people who received the shots were developing unusual blood clots. The cases were first identified in Europe and later in the U.S. Notably, they were reported mainly among recipients of the...
Global warming picking up pace, study says
A new study published in Geophysical Research Letters has confirmed that global warming has entered a phase of significant acceleration. For decades, the earth’s temperature rose at a steady rate of about 0.2 °C per decade. Recent record-breaking years sparked a debate among scientists about whether this pace was increasing but natural events such as...
Women’s Day Special | ‘The greatest freedom is intellectual independence’
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...
How technology is transforming healthcare
Healthcare is entering a phase where the boundaries between medicine, technology, and data are rapidly dissolving. Digital health, once confined to electronic medical records and teleconsultations, now underpins diagnostics, drug development, population health management, chronic disease care, and patient engagement. This has not only transformed how care is delivered, but also significantly widened the range...
