Tag: Science

Dolly Parton’s most enduring contribution to science, from a public point of view, is probably Dolly, the cloned sheep. Though that was a reference to her prominent mammaries, a fact she reacted to with her characteristic good humour, despite the controversy, but the whole story is that Dolly Parton, singer, celebrity, and philanthropist, who died...

In the heart of the Western Ghats lies a rare conglomeration of freshwater swamps, restricted to a patch in Kulathupuzha, Kerala: it consists of plants with pneumatophores (aerial roots that grow vertically out of water) and stilt roots adapted to waterlogged conditions and they support a plethora of fauna. They are ecologically crucial in regulating...

The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is India’s preeminent digital payments system. In July 2026 alone, it processed 2,366 crore transactions — or around 7,600 transactions per second — in total worth nearly ₹30 lakh crore. Across the 2025-26 financial year, UPI handled 24,160 crore transactions worth ₹314 lakh crore, accounting for 85% of the country’s...

The world needs more mega-science projects, said Director-General of CERN, Mark Thomson, during his visit to Mumbai on Monday (August 31, 2026) for the India premiere of ‘The Peace Particle’, a documentary on CERN. The documentary was premiered at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. During the programme, Mr. Thomson also delivered an address on...

In a new study, scientists have found small, short-lived brightenings in the Sun’s atmosphere that appear in the hours before a major solar flare erupts and cluster around the very spot where the flare later occurs. The study was carried out by researchers from the Manipal Centre for Natural Sciences and Manipal Academy of Higher...

NASA is preparing to launch its next flagship space observatory — one scientists plan to use to investigate some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, including dark energy and dark matter, while also testing gravity at vast scales and hunting ​for planets beyond our solar system. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is a roughly $4...

Quantum physics has made numerous strange predictions, and scientists have checked and confirmed many of them. But one of the strangest ones persists unresolved. In the 1930s, the German physicists Werner Heisenberg and Hans Heinrich Euler proposed that empty space is not really empty. Instead, they predicted that in the presence of a magnetic field,...

Famous supergiant star Betelgeuse may not be alone Using the Very Large Telescope, astronomers have found strong evidence that Betelgeuse, the famous red supergiant star, has a close companion, now called Betelgeuse B. It seems to be a young star around 2.6-3.1-times as heavy as our sun. And it could explain why Betelgeuse’s brightness changes...

(This article forms a part of the Science for All newsletter that takes the jargon out of science and puts the fun in! Subscribe now!) In 2024 a short video clip circulated on TikTok showed an unknown, tiny, colourless creature emerge from a borewell near the border between India and Nepal, beneath the Indo-Gangetic plain. Scientists...