Tag: Science

Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla has said the next five to 10 years are going to be defining times for India as far as space exploration is concerned, as a lot of things are going to happen. In an interactive session on the sidelines of space startup Skyroot’s facility inauguration in Hyderabad on November 27, Mr....

The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced that it has secured a record budget of 22.1 billion euros to fund its programmes for the next three years, as the continent seeks greater independence in space. The ESA also approved a plan to bolster defence cooperation and laid out plans for scientific space missions at a...

Scientists conducting a field survey in Manipur’s Imphal West district have discovered fossil evidence indicating that thorniness in bamboo was already present in Asia during the Ice Age, a government release said. Researchers from the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences (BSIP), an autonomous body under the Department of Science and Technology (DST), found a bamboo...

Scientists have solved the mystery of 3.4 million-year-old fossils called the “Burtele Foot” discovered in Ethiopia in 2009, finding they belonged to an enigmatic human ancestor that lived alongside another closely related species during a poorly understood time in human evolution. Based on the recent discovery nearby of 25 teeth and the jawbone of a...

The Scientists for Genetic Diversity, a group of scientists, has written to Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav, and the Director General of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research M. L. Jat expressing its concern over the “compromise proposal” presented at the 11th session of the governing body (GB11) of...

The Baikonur cosmodrome is a spaceport in Kazakhstan that Russia leases and operates as the site of its space launches. It was built in the 1950s first as a missile test range before becoming the centre of the Soviet space programme. The R-7 rocket launched Sputnik 1 in 1957 and Vostok 1 in 1961, which...

A recent paper by Olivier Garsmeur and colleagues titled ‘The genomic footprints of wild Saccharum species trace domestication, diversification, and modern breeding of sugarcane’ in the journal Cell conducted genomic analyses of 390 sugarcane breeds from Australia, Brazil, China, France, French Polynesia, India, Japan, and the US. These plants were hybrids of a variety of...

The NASA ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) satellite, launched in July, has entered the science phase, the ISRO announced on Friday (November 28, 2025). The earth observation satellite provides all-weather, day-and-night data, which have a wide range of applications. It is the first satellite jointly developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the...

A crucial set of tests on the Samudrayaan, India’s first manned-submersible dive into the ocean, is likely only mid-next year following a delay in the procurement of syntactic foam cladding from France. The Samudrayaan consists of a sphere capable of plunging to a depth of 6,000 metres into the ocean. Only a handful of countries have...

The effects of feminising gender-affirmative hormone therapy (GAHT) are more than skin deep, new research in Nature Medicine has reported, with the changes going down to the very proteins circulating in a person’s blood. University of Melbourne endocrinologist Ada Cheung, who co-led the study, has called the findings “a world-first”. Sanjay Kalra, an endocrinologist and...