Category: Science

On successive weekends in November, hundreds of Delhi residents gathered at India Gate holding placards saying “I miss breathing” and “right to live, not just survive”. Winter’s onset once again plunged the National Capital Region into a dense smog, with the air quality index refusing to exit the ‘severe’ (301-400) or ‘very poor’ (201-300) levels….

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External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar addresses a conference on ’50 Years of the Biological Weapons Convention: Strengthening Bio-security for the Global South’, in New Delhi on December 1. | Photo Credit: PTI The story so far: New age biotechnologies endow powers to understand biology better and, consequently, harness biological agents to target humans. Thus, biosecurity…

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On December 8, economic historian Joel Mokyr delivered his lecture in Stockholm as part of the ceremony in which he received his share of the special Nobel Prize for economics, for “having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress”. His talk recapitulated his long-standing argument that a self-reinforcing relationship between science and technology…

Read More “Joel Mokyr’s story of how science becomes technology is incomplete” »

In the late 1960s, at the height of the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese government was facing a serious crisis. It was losing more soldiers to malaria than to the war itself. Chloroquine, the antimalarial drug used for decades, had lost its effectiveness because Plasmodium falciparum, the malaria parasite, had become resistant to it. Desperate for…

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Titas Chanda (left) and Sthitadhi Roy. | Photo Credit: International Centre for Theoretical Physics The 2025 ICTP Prize has been awarded to Titas Chanda of IIT-Madras and Sthitadhi Roy of the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Bengaluru, the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) has said. A statement said the award “recognises the winners’ exceptional…

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