Tag: Science

When a wall of water suddenly crashes from the sky and sweeps away homes and roads within minutes, one of the first words officials and the media in India reach for is ‘cloudburst’. However, the term is often misused in a way that can distract from poor planning and crumbling infrastructure. What counts as a...

The late 18th and 19th centuries marked a period of profound intellectual and cultural awakening across India, with Bengal emerging as its prominent centre. Although similar currents of intellectual, social, and cultural reform were taking shape in several other parts of the country, the scale, diversity, and enduring influence of this awakening found their fullest...

— Mahua Ray A: The primary reason plant-based foods are rarely salty while animal products have a more savoury taste profile is because animals have nervous systems and blood and plants don’t. Animals generally need lots of sodium to maintain their extracellular fluids like blood and lymph and to fire neurons. And because salt is...

Astronomers have used data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope to piece together the clearest yet map of star formation across most of the Andromeda Galaxy over the last 500 million years. The Andromeda is 2-2.5-times wider than the Milky Way, and the two galaxies have a coin-toss’s chance of colliding within the next 10...

India does not lack respected homes for theoretical physics research. Asked why it needs another, Jainendra K. Jain — founding director of the Lodha Theoretical Physics Institute (LTPI) — answers by describing what the place will not do. It will be “smaller” than the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) , narrower in scope than...

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...