Tag: Science

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...

On November 26, a fire started on scaffolding at the Wang Fuk Court housing complex in Tai Po in Hong Kong and spread rapidly across multiple high-rise blocks wrapped in bamboo and other flammable external materials. At least 44 people had died as of 7 am IST (November 27) while hundreds were missing. The local...

Imagine watching the brain not as a finished organ but as a city under construction, where every neuron is a worker changing jobs as the skyline rises. A series of papers in Nature published on November 5 has captured exactly that. Led by researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in the USA, together...

China has finished building its Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), a bittersweet development given that the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) has been in limbo for years. Both JUNO and INO were designed to study subatomic particles called neutrinos, which are very hard to catch because they rarely interact with matter. This is why both INO...

(This article forms a part of the Science for All newsletter that takes the jargon out of science and puts the fun in! Subscribe now!) How far can plant life be pushed in harsh environments? Climate change as much as humans’ plans for colonies on the moon or Mars make this question urgent. Scientists already...

Q: How can candle wicks hold a flame for so long? – Sadhika G. A: A candle wick holds a flame because it isn’t just a string that burns. Its main purpose is to deliver fuel to the part of it that’s very hot. When you light the wick, the heat quickly melts the wax...