Tag: Science

The story so far: The African Union (AU) has endorsed the ‘Correct the Map’ campaign to replace the Mercator map projection with alternatives such as the Equal Earth map. At the heart of this demand is the charge that the Mercator projection, still widely used in schools, media, and online platforms, systematically distorts the sizes...

The United Nations on Friday (September 4, 2026) voted for ⁠a shift away from the 16th-century Mercator global map towards one more accurately reflecting countries’ true size, a resolution sponsored by African states to counter perceptions that the continent ‌is peripheral. Togo led the initiative to further the African Union campaign to limit use of...

Scientists have used the world’s largest telescope to study the sun to capture the highest-resolution pictures yet of the sun’s surface, revealing small, violent plasma whirlpools moving across it. The discovery could change how scientists understand the way energy and magnetic fields move through the sun’s atmosphere. These whirlpools seem like an efficient way to...

The story so far: Following sustained local protests and pressure from civil society groups, Google has reportedly said its planned 1-GW data centre in Visakhapatnam district will use air-cooling technology to cool its servers. While air-cooling requires less water, it comes with its own trade-offs. Why does a large data centre generate heat? A large...

A year after the launch of the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission and the Axiom-4 mission that sent astronaut-candidate Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla to the International Space Station, the U.S. space agency has formally extended an invitation to India to join its ambitious ‘Moon Base’ programme under the Artemis Accords. At the ninth meeting...

The recent catastrophic flash floods in Nepal, apparently triggered by the collapse of a glacier rock mass that sent ice, rock, and sediment downstream, causing a sudden surge of water and debris in the river, highlight the destructive power of such events. A vastly larger outburst flood occurred on Mars during the Late Hesperian to...

The United Nations on Friday (September 4, 2026) voted for ⁠a shift away from the 16th-century Mercator global map towards one more accurately reflecting countries’ true size, a resolution sponsored by African states to counter perceptions that the continent ‌is peripheral. Togo led the initiative to further the African Union campaign to limit use of...

Developments in number theory in the last two weeks illustrate how artificial intelligence is helping advance the frontiers of mathematics, but also raising questions about what mathematics means vis-à-vis humans. The first development is about the Riemann zeta function, a mathematical idea connected to the distribution of prime numbers. The prime numbers, 2, 3, 5,...

Dark matter, the unseen substance that makes up most of the universe’s matter, could play a more dramatic role than previously thought. A new study suggests that heavy dark matter particles trapped inside a dense star could accumulate at its core, collapse into a tiny black hole roughly the mass of a loaded semi-truck and...

A team of Indian researchers has produced the first comprehensive molecular and functional profile of the venom gland of Stegodyphus sarasinorum, a colonial spider species found across the Indian subcontinent, to identify numerous proteins and small molecules that could serve as promising leads for future drug discovery. Published in Springer Nature’s peer-reviewed, open-access journal Scientific Reports,...