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It isn’t every day someone casually mentions they are heading back to a cabin near the North Pole. Yet, that is exactly what 57-year-old Hilde Fålun Strøm, a citizen scientist based in Longyearbyen, the world’s northernmost town, told me when we met last year in the frozen archipelago of Svalbard. Norwegian by nationality, Strøm grew…
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When pregnant women experience higher ambient temperatures during gestation, fewer males are born, a recent analysis of demographic and health surveys in sub-Saharan Africa and India, showed. A paper titled ‘Temperature and sex ratios at birth’ in the journal Demography, by Jasmin Abdel Ghany et al., concludes after a detailed analysis that experiencing higher ambient temperatures during pregnancy is associated with changes in the natural sex ratio at…
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Rosalind Franklin | Photo Credit: Special arrangement While the death of James Watson on November 6, 2025, closed a famous chapter in the history of DNA, it also opened a necessary conversation about who we choose to remember, how, and why. The discovery of the double helix structure of the DNA remains a scientific triumph…
Read More “Patriarchy, the Matilda effect, and the erasure of women in STEM” »
Girls and women represent half the population of the world yet their participation in scientific research is lagging. In many countries, this disparate contribution starts as early as school. In the U.S., for example, girls are less likely to take advanced calculus, physics, mathematics, and biology at high school level. In many other countries, the…
Read More “Why India’s ‘leaky pipeline’ in research is unlike the rest of the world” »
The story so far: In its quest for energy security, on March 2, India signed a CAD 2.6 billion deal with Canada’s Cameco. The deal ensures a supply of around 10,000 tonnes of uranium between 2027 and 2035 to India. What uranium ‘stocks’ does India have? India has both domestic reserves and imported stockpiles of…
Read More “India-Canada uranium deal and India’s nuclear programme | Explained” »
A relaxation by the World Health Organization (WHO) in the prescribed dosage for the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine and ‘free’ doses may have pushed back the inclusion of an India-made vaccine into the national programme to inoculate children against HPV. This, despite the Health Ministry in 2023 committing to preparing the India-made vaccine for…
Read More “‘Free’ vaccines, single-dose nudge pushes India-made HPV vaccine to back of the line” »
Abdus Salam | Photo Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 NL Published – March 05, 2026 05:00 pm IST Read Comments Copy link Email Facebook Twitter Telegram LinkedIn WhatsApp Reddit Source link
The Webb space telescope’s image of the Serpens Nebula. | Photo Credit: NASA A: Most believers of this idea follow an argument made by the philosopher Nick Bostrom. In half a century, video games have gone from dots on a screen to lifelike 3D worlds. Believers argue that in future, we will eventually create simulations…
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Brain co-processors are an emerging technology aimed at enhancing the human brain’s natural abilities in ways relevant to real-life situations. Photo: brain-computation.iisc.ac.in The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) on March 4 launched a moonshot project to develop brain co-processors that combine neuromorphic hardware and AI algorithms to enhance or restore brain function. The project is…
Read More “IISc and Pratiksha Trust launch moonshot project on brain co-processors” »
In India, urban noise is relentless yet it is largely under-recognised as a public health concern. The average Indian urban traffic reportedly routinely reaches 80-100 dB, exceeding the World Health Organization’s recommended 70 dB limit, creating a recognised risk of hearing loss. Noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) has long been viewed as an occupational disease of…
Read More “Traffic noise exposes kinks in India’s urban regulations” »