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The story so far: On September 27, a political rally by actor and Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) founder Vijay in Tamil Nadu’s Karur district ended in a fatal crowd crush in which 41 people were killed. Chief Minister M.K. Stalin appointed a one-person commission headed by retired judge Aruna Jagadeesan to examine the tragedy’s causes….
Read More “How is India responding to crowding disasters? | Explained” »
We’ve lived through a pandemic, surviving to tell a tale. Ask anyone now, or even decades later, what they remember of the year 2020, and the first thing that would come to their minds, regardless of where they hail from, would be the COVID-19 pandemic. Such was the all-pervasive nature of the disease and the…
On a July morning in 1960, Jane Goodall stepped off a boat onto the shores of Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania. She was 26, untrained by universities, armed only with binoculars, a notebook and patience. What she saw in the forests of Gombe in East Africa altered science itself: chimpanzees who shaped tools, who mourned, who…
The west coast of India, nestled between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats, has long been a melting pot of diverse human populations. Over centuries, it has witnessed the movement of various West Eurasian groups — including the Portuguese, Middle Easterners, Jews, Parsees and Christian missionaries. Now, scientists at the CSIR-Centre for Cellular &…
Andre Geim remains the sole scientist to have won both an Ig Nobel prize and a Nobel Prize. | Photo Credit: Bengt Oberger (CC BY-SA) Recent reports stated that two Indian scientists had received Ig Nobel prize in the Engineering Design category in 2025. We know of the Nobel Prizes but the Ig Nobels? As…
Read More “The 2025 Ig Nobel prizes: laugh, and then think” »
The Sunderbans is one of the worst-climate change hit regions of India. It is home to millions of people who have depended on these rivers and forests for generations. The rivers here are the lifeline of these islands. They connect remote islands to one another. But these same rivers are now threatening the existence of…
Read More “Watch: Is climate change driving people out of the Sunderbans?” »
India’s digital transformation has revolutionised communication, education, commerce, and governance. From smartphones to smart homes, convenience has become the cornerstone of contemporary urban living. Yet, beneath this technological leap lies a growing environmental and public health catastrophe: electronic waste (e-waste). E-waste, the fastest-growing solid waste stream globally, is now one of India’s most pressing yet…
Read More “The cost of convenience: health hazards as a side effect of using digital tools” »
The vortex is the liquid’s way of balancing rotation, pressure, and gravity. | Photo Credit: TPMotion/pixabay When you stir liquid in a tumbler, you are forcing it to spin in circles. For anything to move in a circle, it needs an inward pull. In a liquid, this inward pull comes from pressure differences: the pressure…
Read More “Why does stirring a liquid in a cup create a vortex?” »
The SARAL tool would help generate lay person summaries of complex scientific research, the Anusandhan National Research Foundation’s CEO Shivkumar Kalyanaraman said. Photo: X/@ANRFIndia As part of its outreach to make scientific research more accessible, the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), India’s newest science funding agency, has developed a tool called SARAL (Simplified and Automated…
Jane Goodall, a primatologist and ethologist known worldwide for chronicling the life of chimpanzees in East Africa, died on October 1 at the age of 91. Goodall died of natural causes in Los Angeles while on a speaking tour of the U.S., a statement from the Jane Goodall Institute said. Goodall’s films and books reshaped…
Read More “Jane Goodall: the scientist who gave chimps names, not numbers” »