Tag: Science

On the second anniversary of India’s maiden solar mission, Aditya-L1 reaching the Lagrangian point (L1), the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Tuesday (January 6, 2026) made the Announcement of Opportunity (AO) soliciting proposals for the first AO cycle observations. The Aditya-L1 spacecraft reached the L1 point on January 6, 2024, 127 days after it...

The 2019 draft version of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 made two sweeping assertions in seven words: “teaching is strengthened through research and vice-versa.” Are these assertions supported by evidence, however? This article restricts itself to the first part of the assertion — that teaching is strengthened through research — because of its direct...

Say you’re on a desert island on a quest for buried treasure. You’ve lost your map and run out of clues. Now you have two options: you could walk around with a shovel, digging holes at random and hoping for the best, or you could fly a drone overhead equipped with special cameras that can...

The hydrogen molecule H2 is the simplest stable molecule, with two protons and two electrons bound together. Scientists have studied it for more than a century because it’s small enough that theory can try to predict its behaviour from basic physics yet it’s rich enough to include many features found in larger molecules. This said,...

In the predawn darkness, a team of scientists climbs the slope of Mexico’s Popocatépetl volcano, one of the world’s most active and whose eruption could affect millions of people. Its mission: figure out what is happening under the crater. For five years, the group from Mexico’s National Autonomous University has climbed the volcano with kilos...

The dictionary of life has a new update. A DNA sequence that signals cells in almost all other organisms to stop synthesising proteins instead encodes a rare amino acid in some archaea, according to a study published in Science in November. Archaea are microbes that resemble bacteria in shape and size but are biologically distinct....

A “wolf supermoon” is a nickname that combines two distinct ideas: a wolf moon and a supermoon. The January 2026 wolf supermoon occurred late last week, reaching the peak of its brightness on January 2 evening (IST). ‘Wolf moon’ is a traditional name for the first full moon that happens in January. In fact many...

GUWAHATI A study published in the Indian Journal of History of Science a few months ago has challenged long-held beliefs about the origins of mineral acids, suggesting that ancient Indian scholars may have understood and used them centuries before similar knowledge appeared in Europe or the Arab world. For decades, historians believed that Arab alchemists developed mineral...

The story so far: Climate change is real, and for India to continue meeting domestic food demands, agriculture needs to cope with the increasing unpredictability of the weather, declining soil health, and growing air pollution. What is climate-resilient agriculture? Climate-resilient agriculture uses a range of biotechnology and complementary technologies to guide farming practices and reduce...

A: Your smartphone knows which way is up due to its accelerometer. It’s a chip whose parts shift slightly when the phone accelerates or when gravity acts along a particular direction. The phone’s software reads the accelerometer’s measurements along the x, y, and z directions and figures out which side is pointing towards the earth....