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A view of the site of a landslide in Yambali village, Enga Province, Papua New Guinea, May 27, 2024. | Photo Credit: Reuters A devastating landslide struck several remote villages in the mountainous Enga province in Papua New Guinea late last week. While it is too early for official confirmation, estimates place the death toll between 690…
Read More “What causes landslides? Can we predict them to save lives?” »
Agnibaan SubOrbital Technological Demonstrator (SOrTeD), vehicle is seen at Agnikul’s Launchpad at Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, India, November 28, 2022. | Photo Credit: Reuters India’s Agnikul Cosmos called off a test flight of its first rocket on Tuesday seconds before it was due to launch – the fourth such cancellation in the last…
Read More “India’s space startup calls off maiden rocket launch for a fourth time” »
The discovery of steel transformed the course of human civilisation. The stone age ended with the invention and widespread use of copper smelting and alloying copper with other elements, thus introducing metalworking, new and more durable agricultural implements, the development of culture, trade, and governments, and new weapons of war. When heated, copper turns to…
Read More “Copper becomes unexpectedly hard under extreme strain rate” »
A cinnabar moth (Tyria jacobaeae) caterpillar, July 8, 2011. | Photo Credit: Quartl (CC BY-SA 3.0) Caterpillars have a sixth sense that most land-based animals do not. They can sense electric fields around them with small bristles called setae on its body — a feat called electroreception. British researchers have discovered this in laboratory experiments…
Read More “Caterpillars may sense threats using electric fields” »
Colour plays an outsized role in the human experience of modern life. It invests both natural and synthetic worlds with beauty and meaning. Colours don’t deny universalism — a red sign will make you stop anywhere on the planet — yet they also make room for human cultures to appropriate them in unique, even discordant,…
Read More “What are colours and how do people understand them? | Explained” »
Growing up in the 1990s in India meant having seen an ad for a glucose-based drink on television in which the Sun literally sucks the life-force out of children with a giant straw as they are playing. This ad has started to hit closer to reality. India has increasingly been in the grip of more…
Read More “This century, heat waves are moving slower and lasting longer” »
Shrinivas Kulkarni has won the 2024 Shaw Prize for Astronomy for his studies of astronomical transients. | Photo Credit: Shiv Kumar Pushpakar/The Hindu, File photo In astronomy, a ‘transient’ is any celestial object whose brightness changes in short spans of time. There are many kinds of astronomical transients, all of them united by phenomena that…
Read More “Astronomical transients: bright in the blink of an eye” »
The Egyptians and Babylonians used lapis lazuli 6,000 years ago. In 1802, a French chemist synthesised cobalt blue. In 2009 scientists discovered YInMn Blue, otherwise known as Oregon Blue. But most of these pigments have limitations in terms of cost, stability, colour or toxicity. In 2020, researchers reported a new class of ‘cool’ blue colourants…
The mango season across India is on, and along with it the usual debate about which is the best mango variety to have. We in Telangana claim that the ‘Banganapalli’ and ‘Benishan’ are matchless and nothing else can come even close. My wife and her family from Gujarat say that the best is Ratnagiri or…
Sudden, severe dry spells known as flash droughts are rising in intensity around the world, with a notable exception in mountainous Central Asia, where flash drought extent is shrinking, according to new research. Heat and changes to precipitation patterns caused by a warming climate are driving these trends, the study found. The new study is the…
Read More “Warming climate intensifies flash droughts worldwide” »