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…
Four kilometres beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, beyond the reach of sunlight and far from shipping lanes, lies a forgotten chapter of the nuclear age.Scattered across a vast stretch of seabed are more than 200,000 barrels of radioactive waste. They were lowered into the ocean over several decades during the second half of…
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…
Artemis II mission: NASA is set to reveal the four astronauts selected for its Artemis III mission tonight, but the announcement carries more weight than a routine crew assignment. While most searches for Artemis-III astronauts point toward a long-awaited Moon landing crew, the reality being presented now is more complex. Artemis III is increasingly being…
Astronomers don’t treat every “close approach” headline the same way the public does. On June 9, two near-Earth objects, 2026 LD and 2026 KM3, are being tracked as they pass Earth at distances measured in millions of kilometres. On paper, they’re described as “aeroplane-sized,” a comparison that tends to amplify concern. But in orbital mechanics…
