Tag: Science

ISRO Chairman V. Narayanan on Tuesday (February 10, 2026) said that India’s space programme was conceived as a people-centric and application-driven initiative, rooted in international cooperation rather than competition. Highlighting six decades of the country’s space journey, Mr. Narayanan said the programme had evolved from modest beginnings into a globally respected ecosystem that serves not...

Two of the world’s most visible private space companies are shifting their attention and resources to moon missions even as both continue to speak about longer term ambitions to Mars and beyond. For many years, the public identity of SpaceX has been fused with settling humans on Mars. Its founder and CEO Elon Musk has...

Two of the world’s most visible private space companies are shifting their attention and resources to moon missions even as both continue to speak about longer term ambitions to Mars and beyond. For many years, the public identity of SpaceX has been fused with settling humans on Mars. Its founder and CEO Elon Musk has...

Did you know that there was a time in history when diamonds were believed to exist only in India? The hardest natural material on Earth, diamonds were first discovered in India nearly 3,000 years ago. For more than a millennia, India remained the only source of diamonds for the world, a monopoly that the country...

A fresh year has just started, and we are already a month old. Year endings and startings are always occasions to ponder. Here in IIT Kanpur, where some of us teach, the first week of January is always hectic. A new semester just started, students are back after winter breaks, and people are rushing through...

Footprints are among the most common kind of dinosaur fossils. Sometimes scientists find a single, lonely footprint. ‍Sometimes they come across a chaotic jumble of tracks resembling a dance floor, sort of a dinosaur discotheque. But identifying which ​dinosaur left which track has been notoriously difficult. Researchers have now developed a method harnessing artificial intelligence...

On January 20, 2026, Rev. Dr. Leo D’Souza, a Jesuit scientist based in Mangaluru, died aged 93. Dr. D’Souza, fondly known as Fr Leo, trained in the 1960s at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, working alongside stalwarts in the field such as Ingo Potrykus, Joseph Straub, and Sudhir Kumar Sopory....

SpaceX is putting its longstanding focus of sending humans to Mars on the back burner to prioritise establishing a settlement on the Moon, founder Elon Musk said Sunday (February 8, 2026). The South Africa-born billionaire’s space company has found massive success as a NASA contractor, but critics have for years panned Mr. Musk’s Mars colonisation...

One puff of a cigarette, within seconds, infuses the human bloodstream (via the lungs) with nicotine, the acutely addictive and carcinogenic chemical in tobacco. Nicotine binds to the brain’s cellular receptors, sparking the dopaminergic reward system to keep smokers hooked. And then there are additives in cigarettes, such as menthol, which gets nicotine to linger...

In a new study in Nature, scientists from IIT-Delhi and Germany have demonstrated a device to separate electrons based on their ‘handedness’ without powerful magnetic fields, taking a step towards chiral electronics, which could in future enable low-power devices. The human left hand is a mirror image of the right; the two can’t be perfectly...