Apollo 11 will forever be remembered as the mission which enabled human beings to set foot on the moon, our natural satellite, for the first time. While the first will always remain the first, the same cannot be said for what is the last such mission, as future missions might take that place. But for...
In the high ranges of Peermade, Travancore (the current Peermade of Idukki district in Kerala), in 1918, a young girl was born to Modayil Pothen Mani, a well-known civil engineer cum plantation owner and his wife. Little did anyone in the misty hills of Idukki know that one day the place would be known by...
It was in about 430 BCE that the crucial, mind-altering, breathtaking idea of ‘everything’ being made up of atoms emerged. A cheerful Greek philosopher, Democritus, who spent a truckload of time observing nature, eventually figured out the foundational maxim of many sciences today and coined the Latin word “atomos”, which is where “atom” comes from....
Imagine a classroom where you are given the space to explore and understand concepts on your own with the guidance of a teacher and the internet. Imagine the amount of knowledge which will open up if this non-traditional education style is adopted. That is exactly what Professor Sugata Mitra, a computer scientist and educational theorist,...
Linguistics has a confession to make. It is just like you. It tells you that it is as emotional, messy, dynamic, strategic, and perfectly imperfect as any human being. Whatever you are, linguistics becomes. Why? Because linguistics watches you. It watches you with the same clinical precision of a surgeon. It watches you speak and...
“Nani, aaj kya banaya?” (”Grandma, what did you cook today?”) It’s a simple question that millions of Indians ask every day. But what if you asked it to an AI assistant? Would it understand the language? The accent? The mix of Hindi and English? What if the question was asked in Tulu, Bundeli, Kodava or...
Mary Anning was born in a little town in South West England in the 18th Century. Her father Richard Anning was a carpenter. When Mary was about a year old, she survived a major lightning strike that killed the woman who was carrying her. This ‘miraculous escape’ soon made her famous in her little town....
Launch Vehicle A launch vehicle, commonly known as a rocket, is the powerful vehicle that carries a spacecraft from Earth into space. Its primary job is to generate enough thrust to overcome Earth’s gravity and place the mission on the correct path. Once it has completed this task, the rocket’s role ends. What does it...
In low Earth orbit can be found the International Space Station — a large laboratory where astronauts from different countries live and work together while circling Earth every 90 minutes. What began as a project involving the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada is today a strong symbol of cooperation among countries for the...
