Tag: Science

Comet 10P/Tempel 2, which was last visible from Earth five-and-a-half years ago, can now once again be spotted by observers in Bengaluru in the wee hours till early August. Comet 10P/Tempel 2, which was discovered in the year 1873, completes one orbit around the Sun every 5.5 years. Its last sighting was in 2021. “The...

How much can realistically change within the span of a single political term? The answer matters because India’s wider growth and development ambitions now hinge on how its cities handle water. Urban India is expected to drive the bulk of GDP growth this decade — yet many city water systems remain fragile. Utilities lose more...

The Fields Medal — one of the top honours in mathematics — for 2026 was awarded to Yu Deng, John Pardon, Jacob Tsimerman, and Hong Wang. The Medal is awarded every four years and recognises important contributions to mathematics research by people who are younger than 40 at the time they receive it. Of this...

A U.S.-Russian space crew landed safely in the steppes of Kazakhstan on Sunday (July 26, 2026) after an eight-month stint on the International Space Station. NASA astronaut Chris Williams and Russian crewmates Sergei Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev touched down in their Soyuz MS-28 that landed smoothly by parachute in a designated area southeast of Dzhezkazgan....

PRAXIS is an acronym of ‘Planetary Rings Autonomous EXploration with In-situ Sampling’. NASA has just selected a mission concept called ‘PRAXIS’ for its Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) 2026 phase I funding. The mission will consist of a bio-inspired robotic explorer driven by an artificial intelligence (AI) model. It will be capable of directly sampling particles...

India’s drug regulator just approved the country’s first dengue vaccine, Qdenga. It is designed and claimed to protect against the four serotypes of the dengue-causing virus, called DENV-1 to DENV-4. Young children as well as adults (aged 4-60 years), irrespective of whether they have had dengue before, may be vaccinated with Qdenga. More than 40...

What is your height? This seemingly innocuous question, if you come to think of it, doesn’t always hand you the same answer. No, I’m not talking about the numerical part of the answer that is bound to be different for different people owing to their different heights. I am, instead, drawing your attention to the...

Towering 407 feet (124 metres), Starship soared from the company’s base at the southern tip of Texas. NASA monitored the flight, a critical step toward using the Starship as a lunar lander for moon crews. Elon Musk’s SpaceX replaced six of the 33 engines on the first-stage booster after they failed to ignite last week,...

Who were the people who left their dead in a cave 4,000 m above a Ladakhi village — and why does almost nobody alive carry their particular mix of ancestries? A study published in Science Advances on Friday has reported genome-wide data from ten individuals recovered from Old Lady Spider Cave, or Abi Srinjamo Bao,...

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is being poisoned by politicisation. With each passing year of late, it is a darker shadow of its once-formidable self, on the brink of a history in which it is no longer an engine of national growth. In the recent past, the organisation has suffered a non-trivial number of...