PC: Northern Arizona University Anyone standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon is usually drawn to what they can see: the immense cliffs, the shifting colours of the rock, and the vast distances stretching towards the horizon. Yet some of the canyon’s most important features are hidden from view. Beneath the dry landscape lies…
Standing in the courtyard of the Qutb complex in Delhi, the Iron Pillar is one of the most extraordinary achievements of ancient Indian metallurgy. Forged during the Gupta period around the 4th or 5th century CE, the monument has stood beneath the open sky for nearly 1,600 years while showing remarkably little corrosion. Historians widely…
Avani Ahuja (right) receives the Henry Ford II Scholar Award. Indian-origin MIT graduate Avani Ahuja has received the prestigious Henry Ford II Scholar Award. The honour is among the institute’s top recognitions for undergraduate engineering students and celebrates academic excellence, leadership and future promise. During her time at MIT Ahuja conducted research in power electronics,…
The recent identification of the Lakshadweep Potato Patch Coral located at Kadmat Island has brought international recognition to the marine biodiversity of India, with a focus on coral reefs. Belonging to the species known as Pavona clavus, the living coral formation encompasses about 4,250 square metres, which makes it among the largest coral colonies found…
The view coming back from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has a way of turning familiar categories of comet science slightly awkward. 3I/ATLAS, an interstellar object only briefly passing through the solar system, has been watched before, but this time the reading feels less like a routine update and more like a chemical surprise that…
High on the Tibetan Plateau, where the air feels thin in a way that is hard to describe unless you’ve stood there, human life has been quietly adjusting itself for thousands of years. Villages sit at heights where most visitors feel breathless within hours, sometimes minutes, yet whole communities carry on with farming, family life,…
We live in an era where artificial intelligence can diagnose our lifestyle errors, draft our corporate emails, and map out a step-by-step strategy to text our crush. It processes billions of data points and language patterns in milliseconds to simulate human reasoning. Today, millions of people treat apps like ChatGPT and Google Gemini as digital…
Mathematical model reveals how ambitious you should be. A mathematical model has now cracked the exact degree to which one should be ambitious and unlike conventional wisdom, it says ‘don’t shoot for the stars’. Researchers at the University of Wyoming, Stanford University and the University of Colorado-Boulder came up with the mathematical model to show…
More than a century after she revolutionised astronomy with a discovery that reshaped humanity’s understanding of the cosmos, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin is receiving fresh recognition for her extraordinary achievements. English Heritage has unveiled a blue plaque at her former home in Notting Hill, London, commemorating the scientist whose groundbreaking work revealed that stars are composed primarily…
The problem of how life evolved on Earth has intrigued the minds of many great scientists for centuries. Now, according to an exciting study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), scientists from Harvard University may be a step closer to figuring out how life on Earth was formed. Using their…
