BENGALURU: For decades, scientists trying to understand the Martian surface have relied largely on models that treat the planet as if it were relatively flat. These models have helped explain how temperatures change through the day and across seasons, but they often miss something important: Mars is not flat.A team of researchers from Isro’s Physical…
A sealed vial of sediment pulled from Yukon permafrost does not look like a breakthrough. It looks like dirt until the sequencing results arrive. Inside it, scientists from institutions including McMaster University and the University of Alberta found genetic traces of mammoths, horses, and predators that have not roamed the Arctic for tens of thousands…
Marie Curie (Image: Wikipedia) When people talk about Marie Curie today, they usually start at the end of the story. The Nobel Prizes. The scientific breakthroughs. The place she occupies among the giants of modern science.The beginning was far less glamorous.Before the world knew her name, Curie was a young woman in Russian-controlled Poland, a…
In July 2013, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano found himself in a situation no astronaut ever wants to face. While performing a spacewalk outside the International Space Station, water began leaking into his helmet. What initially seemed like sweat soon turned into a life-threatening emergency as the water rose around his face, impairing his vision and…
Roughly four kilometres below the surface of the central Pacific Ocean, scattered across a stretch of seafloor the size of the continental United States, lie hundreds of billions of apple-sized rocks. They are dark, lumpy, and almost impossibly slow-growing, a few millimetres every million years. Some of the ones sitting on the seabed today began…
Every year, the world generates hundreds of millions of tonnes of plastic waste, and the vast majority of it ends up in places where it is not useful. A landmark 2025 study published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, which conducted a global trade-linked material flow analysis of plastics for 2022, found that the global…
Success has a way of attracting attention. A student tops an examination, and messages pour in. An entrepreneur builds a thriving company, and suddenly everyone wants to hear their story. An athlete wins a championship, and cameras follow their every move. Society loves a winner. It always has.Yet Neil deGrasse Tyson‘s observation points towards something…
Every thought you have, every face you recognise and every memory you recall is powered by an organ that consumes roughly the same amount of electricity as a dim light bulb. The human brain operates on about 20 watts of power, yet it performs tasks that continue to challenge some of the world’s most advanced…
Anaemia was dropped from the sixth National Family Health survey launched in 2023 saying that it will be surveyed more scientifically in the Diet and Biomarkers Survey in India (DABS-I) launched in December 2022. However, the anaemia prevalence data from DABS-I is yet to be made public though it was completed in November 2025. According…
Isaac Newton (Image: Wikipedia) Most people know Isaac Newton as the man linked to the falling apple story, though historians still debate how much of that tale is fact and how much belongs to legend. What is beyond dispute is that Newton spent much of his life trying to answer a question that continues to…
