Tag: Science

Recently, a report titled ‘Macro Perspective of Bihar’s Development Achievements, Unfinished Agenda, and the Way Forward’ presented at the India Policy Forum 2026 received widespread media attention. While it is a good and timely report, one of the recommendations it makes is flawed from public health and social development perspectives: that the State of Bihar...

Recently, India-based defence start-up D-Propulse announced that it had successfully demonstrated a rotating detonation engine at a Defence Research & Development Organisation facility in Hyderabad. A rotating detonation engine, or RDE, is an engine design that promises to use fuel more efficiently than conventional rocket engines. Launching satellites to space on rockets and carrying explosives...

When the James Webb Space Telescope looks deep into the Universe, some of the objects it finds appear as small, red dots. Astronomers call them little red dots (LRDs), and they have become one of the telescope’s more intriguing discoveries. Now, an international team of astronomers has found an unusual object that may help explain...

The story so far: There has been a spate of small earthquakes in Maharashtra over the last fortnight, according to local reports. Of the 29 tremors during this period, 24 were in and around Nashik, four were in Palghar and one was in Nagpur. They weren’t particularly strong — the strongest was in Nagpur on...

Friedreich’s ataxia, or FRDA, is a genetic disorder that progressively damages the nerves and the heart. The affected individuals typically begin to show symptoms between the ages of 5 and 15. They become unsteady and their coordination is impaired. Their speech slows down and slurs. Swallowing becomes difficult. Hearing and vision deteriorates. They feel fatigued, lose sensation,...

Once a journal publishes a research paper, other researchers can keep citing that work and build on it to produce more research. Sometimes, this continues even after, say, the journal withdraws the original paper because it contains a mistake or, as is increasingly the case, it was produced by fraudulent means. So simply withdrawing a...

— Mahua Ray Humans are one of the species whose individual differences are unusually obvious to humans. We can be told apart by skin colour, hair colour, facial proportions, body shape, height, and many other traits. Our brains also excel at processing faces. However, we are also very bad at distinguishing individuals of species we...

Never too soon to switch to an electric vehicle Replacing a functional fossil-fuel vehicle with an EV is almost always better for the climate even if the former car is new, an analysis of lifecycle emissions has found. While manufacturing a new EV creates a carbon debt, it is usually paid back as lower emissions...

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” the English novelist L.P. Hartley wrote famously in his 1953 novel The Go-Between. In a peculiar twist, the same cannot be said of the Moon. It is not a foreign country, or even a foreign world: the U.S.’s manoeuvring to beat China to the...

India spends more to put a kilogram of payload into orbit than any other major spacefaring nation, marring its public image as a cost-effective launcher, according to a new peer-reviewed analysis of more than six decades of rocket launches published in Economics Letters. The authors, Alessio Terzi of the University of Cambridge and Francesco Nicoli...