Tag: Science

For centuries, diamonds have been regarded as symbols of eternal love, characterised by their rarity, scintillation and lustre. But behind the glamour of these stones lies a cold, hard truth: an industry plagued by forced labour, civil violence, and pollution. Some of the world’s largest diamond mines, such as the Argyle mine in Australia and...

Study ‘proves’ colonists brought smallpox to South America Scientists have found direct molecular evidence that European colonisers brought smallpox to South America after recovering the first ancient smallpox genomes from the Americas, in the remains of individuals in Chile. The strains belonged to a now-extinct lineage that branched from European strains around 1296. Analysing the...

S. Somanath, Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), told The Hindu that scientific missions ought to be more important in the future. Excerpts: The LVM3 launch vehicle successfully placed 36 satellites of the privately owned OneWeb consortium. However, you have recently indicated that the Chandrayaan-3 mission (to place a rover on the moon)...

Only three decades ago, the Indian space programme was a diminutive affair, dominated by the newfound successes of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) and a then-fledgling clump of communications satellites. Today, the programme is a large tree with a flourishing canopy. There is a slew of ongoing projects accompanied by projects being ideated, developed,...

Recent reports of nearly 120 scientists resigning from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) have rightly raised concerns. ISRO has been a symbol of India’s scientific aspirations and such an exodus cannot be dismissed as an ordinary episode of employee turnover. Resignations have occurred over the years but the scale of recent departures confronts us...

Researchers have found a previously unknown metal alloy created by the blast of the Hiroshima atomic bomb in 1945. The material was found inside small, glass-like beads called hiroshimaites, which were recovered from the beach sands of Hiroshima Bay. These beads formed when the intense heat of the blast vaporised building materials, soil, and metals,...

The story so far: The Union Cabinet has cleared the Pradhan Mantri Surya Sarovar Yojana (PM-SSY), a central-sector scheme to build 5,000 MW of floating solar photovoltaic (FSPV) capacity on India’s reservoirs and waterbodies. It carries a total outlay of ₹5,070 crore and offers Central Financial Assistance (CFA) of up to ₹1 crore per MW,...

The story so far: On July 30, the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) released a set of guidelines called ‘Authorisation for Undertaking Planned Re-entry of Space Objects’. These guidelines provide a new framework for how companies and government agencies must handle the reentry phase of a space mission. What is a planned re-entry? Objects in...