Category: Science & Tech

The Aravalli Hills look modest today but they sit on some of the oldest and most studied rocks in India. Geologists care about them because they preserve a long record of how a piece of the earth’s crust in northwestern India was built, deformed, heated, and intruded by magma, then worn down. The Hills’ features...

Rare-earth elements are a set of metallic elements in the periodic table. Chemists usually refer to a group of 17 elements when they use this label: the 15 lanthanides from lanthanum to lutetium, and scandium and yttrium. In most classroom periodic tables, the lanthanides are shown as a separate row placed beneath the main periodic...

As India has progressed, the stereotyped image of the “land of snake charmers” has been left behind. We now have snake rescuers. However, in rural areas, snakebites still account for 58,000 deaths every year, affecting workers in paddy fields as much as subsistence farmers in dry landscapes. Snake venoms generally cause three types of damage:...

DNA inside human cells is not free-floating. Instead, it is tightly wrapped around small protein units forming a long chain, with DNA looping around each unit before moving on to the next. This DNA-protein complex is called chromatin and allows nearly 2 m of genetic material to fit inside a nucleus only a few micrometres...