Tag: Science

You must have seen butterflies on top of flowers and leaves, but have you ever wondered what they are up to? Or more specifically, have you wondered how they eat and taste?  This might either disgust you or intrigue you to know more. Feet are the answer. Yes, you heard it right! Butterflies get different...

The sky’s blue is due to Rayleigh scattering — when molecules in the air scatter light of shorter wavelength (bluer) much more efficiently than that of longer ones. On hotter days, however, there can be other things in the air and which can affect how light is scattered. Warmer air can hold more moisture. So...

On a recent weekday, around 50 people gathered outside the headquarters of a Chinese mobile internet company, waiting to get help with installing an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant. The scene in Beijing, China’s capital, was repeated for days at several events and was also seen in the southern technology hub Shenzhen in March, as engineers...

In 1988, a landmark paper appeared in the journal Cell. It showed that in around 95% of pancreatic cancers, a gene called KRAS carried mutations at a particular location. The paper was a watershed moment in cancer research since it was one of the first demonstrations of a mutation with near-universal frequency identified in a...

What is the world’s next great frontier in technology? There are multiple contenders: artificial general intelligence, programmable biology, sustainable energy, metamaterials, human-machine interfaces, and quantum computing. The future could in fact be more wondrous but also more difficult to predict because of how some of these technologies can work together. But there is still a...

When you exercise, your muscles become stronger. When you sow a plant, its stem will bend so that its leaves get more sunlight. Both these changes are examples of adaptation — when a biological material senses its environment, then reorganises its internal structure to survive better. All life must adapt over time to changing conditions....

Medicine treats the evaluation of emerging technologies as a technical problem, but it is not. It is fundamentally an economic problem. When does a ₹30,000 genetic test represent excellent value and when does it represent wasted money? The answer depends on a question members of the medical profession almost never discuss: who’s paying?

J. Craig Venter, who mapped the first draft of the human genome and helped scientists understand how genes shape our lives, died on Wednesday (April 30, 2026). He was 79. Venter’s death was announced by the J. Craig Venter Institute, a genomics research group with locations in La Jolla, California, and Rockville, Maryland. The institute...

Mexico City is sinking by nearly 25 cm a year, according to new satellite imagery released this week by NASA, making it one of the world’s fastest-subsiding metropolises. One of the world’s most sprawling and populated urban areas, at 7,800 sq. km and some 22 million people, the Mexican capital and surrounding cities were built...