On 30 June 1971, recovery teams in Kazakhstan approached a Soyuz capsule that appeared to have completed a flawless return from space. The spacecraft had undocked from the world’s first space station, survived re-entry, deployed its parachutes, and landed exactly as planned. Yet when the hatch was opened, commanders found all three cosmonauts dead. The…
The ascent of a 6,200-metre (20,341 ft) volcano by a walking humanoid machine sounds, at first, like one of those lab demonstrations that never quite leaves controlled conditions. Yet this time it did. A modified robot reached the summit of Chimborazo in Ecuador, spending hours moving across ash, rock, and ice before being carried through…
Most people notice litter, shake their heads and move on. Edgar McGregor did something different. In 2019, while hiking through California’s Eaton Canyon, the Pasadena resident was struck by the sheer volume of rubbish scattered along trails, tucked beneath bushes and caught in streambeds. Plastic bottles, food wrappers and discarded containers had become a familiar…
A patch of the Pacific Ocean has been quietly warming again, drawing attention from meteorologists who spend their time watching patterns most people never think about. The signals are not dramatic on their own: a few degrees here, a shift in sea surface temperatures there, winds behaving slightly differently than expected. But these small changes…
Love has inspired poetry, fuelled wars, launched lifelong partnerships and broken countless hearts. It can feel overwhelming, irrational and impossible to explain. Yet some of the most important clues about why humans fall in love did not emerge from studies of couples, philosophers or poets. Instead, they came from a small brown rodent scurrying through…
In the summer of 1967, a 24-year-old PhD student at the University of Cambridge noticed something unusual hidden within mountains of radio telescope data. The signal appeared as a regular pulse, repeating with astonishing precision and refusing to fit any known astronomical explanation. For months, scientists struggled to understand what they were seeing, even joking…
BENGALURU: In a renewed push to hand over Isro’s LVM-3 launch vehicle to private industry, space regulator-cum-promoter Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) has invited expressions of interest (EoI) for the transfer of technology (ToT) of the country’s heaviest operational rocket.The move comes more than two years after Space PSU NewSpace India Limited…
A meteorite picked up from the sands of the Sahara has begun to complicate the quiet assumptions scientists often make about the early solar system. It is not the sort of object that draws attention at first glance, just a dark fragment of rock with odd mineral flecks caught under a microscope. Yet inside it…
June 2026 is shaping up to be one of the most rewarding months of the year for skywatchers, with a rare lunar occultation of Venus, a three-planet gathering in the evening sky, the arrival of astronomical summer, and a growing collection of deep-sky targets rising into view after dark. The highlight falls on 17 June,…
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…
