More than five decades ago, Apollo 14 carried an unusual payload into deep space when hundreds of tree seeds accompanied the mission on its journey around the Moon. While astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell explored the lunar surface in February 1971, command module pilot Stuart Roosa remained in lunar orbit with the seeds packed…
The history of science is crowded with people whose ideas arrived before the rest of the field was ready for them. Tibor Gánti belonged somewhere in that uneasy category: respected in small circles, barely recognised outside them, and for years almost absent from wider discussions about how life began. His work circulated quietly through Hungarian…
Asteroid alerts often sound more dramatic than the actual risk they pose. This time, NASA is tracking asteroid 2026 HW2, a building-sized space rock currently moving through Earth’s orbital neighbourhood. Travelling at nearly 44,000 kilometres per hour, the asteroid is expected to make its closest approach to Earth around 4:30 pm IST today. Despite the…
When Australian tech investor Mike Gregg became wealthy through his business ventures, he faced a choice common among many successful entrepreneurs about how to use his fortune. Instead of purchasing luxury assets or launching another commercial project, Gregg and his wife Sue invested around $10 million of their own money to buy 17,300 acres of…
On the edge of Arunachal Pradesh, where the forest starts to tighten, and the river systems cut through steep green slopes, a small botanical record has reappeared in a way few expected. A plant tied to old herbarium sheets and colonial-era field notes has been seen again after slipping out of documented sight for generations….
For decades, the accepted explanation for the origins of the Japanese people was relatively straightforward. Modern Japanese populations were understood to descend from two major ancestral groups: the Jomon, ancient hunter-gatherers who inhabited the Japanese archipelago for thousands of years, and the Yayoi, migrants from continental East Asia who arrived bringing rice farming, new technologies,…
Albert Bandura (Image: Wikipedia) Some quotes remain relevant because human nature rarely changes as much as people think it does. Societies evolve. Technology changes rapidly. Entire industries disappear and new ones emerge. Yet human behaviour often repeats the same patterns generation after generation, especially when responsibility becomes shared among large groups of people. That is…
In a remote stretch of Ethiopia’s Afar Rift, something quietly unsettling has begun to emerge from the ground. Fragments of bone, scattered within ancient sediments, are being studied for what they might represent rather than what they obviously are. Among them are remains attributed to early Homo sapiens, dated to around 100,000 years ago, and…
Chandrayaan-2 finds strong evidence for ice in ‘doubly-shadowed’ lunar craters BENGALURU: Scientists working with India’s Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft have discovered strong evidence of ice buried beneath the floor of the Moon’s south pole region in “doubly-shadowed” craters, a finding that could prove critical for future human missions to the lunar surface.The discovery, published this week in…
Every drop of blood in your body is doing something ancient. It is carrying oxygen, fighting infections, clotting wounds, and patrolling for threats, a set of tasks so fundamental to animal life that nearly every creature with a backbone does some version of the same thing. But where did blood cells come from in the…
