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On January 20, 2026, Rev. Dr. Leo D’Souza, a Jesuit scientist based in Mangaluru, died aged 93. Dr. D’Souza, fondly known as Fr Leo, trained in the 1960s at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, working alongside stalwarts in the field such as Ingo Potrykus, Joseph Straub, and Sudhir Kumar Sopory….
Read More “Leo D’Souza, Mangaluru’s Mendel who worked to transform cashew industry” »
A file image of Elon Musk with a logo of SpaceX. | Photo Credit: Reuters SpaceX is putting its longstanding focus of sending humans to Mars on the back burner to prioritise establishing a settlement on the Moon, founder Elon Musk said Sunday (February 8, 2026). The South Africa-born billionaire’s space company has found massive…
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One puff of a cigarette, within seconds, infuses the human bloodstream (via the lungs) with nicotine, the acutely addictive and carcinogenic chemical in tobacco. Nicotine binds to the brain’s cellular receptors, sparking the dopaminergic reward system to keep smokers hooked. And then there are additives in cigarettes, such as menthol, which gets nicotine to linger…
Read More “Are taxes on cigarettes adequate to deter consumers in India?” »
False-coloured SEM image of the microstructured device of PdGa made using focused-ion beam techniques, showing the three-arm geometry. The scale bar is 10 μm. | Photo Credit: Dixit, A., Sivakumar, P.K., Manna, K. et al. Nature 649, 47–52 (2026) In a new study in Nature, scientists from IIT-Delhi and Germany have demonstrated a device to separate…
Read More “IIT-Delhi, Germany team makes device to sort current by ‘handedness’” »
In settings where rapid, affordable diagnostics are unavailable, antibiotics often substitute for testing instead of complementing it. | Photo Credit: Volodymyr Hryshchenko/Unsplash Charles Darwin’s central insight wasn’t just that species evolve but that they can’t but adapt in the presence of selection pressures. In practical terms, organisms don’t choose to change: they respond to the…
Read More “Antimicrobial resistance: Charles Darwin was right; India’s drug policy isn’t” »
Drug-resistant pneumonia remains a serious complication in intensive care units, where treatment options are limited. Pseudomonas aeruginosa in particular causes about one in five hospital pneumonias and often resists multiple drugs. A research team at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, affiliated with Harvard Medical School, has reported that a gas already used in neonatal care…
Read More “Can a common hospital gas help fight drug-resistant pneumonia?” »
The budget has brought some cheer to India’s research community, particularly for those involved in astronomy and space research, as it has earmarked ₹13,416.20 crore for the Department of Space for 2026-27. A large chunk of the allocation has been set aside for deep-space exploration and astrophysics, including to build two advanced telescope facilities: the…
Read More “Budget may cut reliance on foreign telescopes; trips on space spending” »
This undated photo shows Thwaites glacier in Western Antarctica. | Photo Credit: NASA A: Thwaites glacier is a large glacier in West Antarctica, about the size of a large country. Scientists have often called it the “Doomsday Glacier” in the media. It is one of the most important places on the earth for those trying…
1. What is it about Claude’s latest release that has spooked markets and hurt Indian IT stocks? On January 30, Anthropic released 11 open-source plugins for Claude Cowork, its AI workplace suite. Unlike conventional chatbots, Cowork functions as an autonomous digital colleague: it reads files, drafts documents, reviews contracts, and executes multi-step workflows across legal,…
Read More “Why did Anthropic’s Claude Cowork plugins spook markets? | The Hindu Explains” »
The government of Tamil Nadu’s Directorate of Drug Control recently issued a public notice against a specific batch of Almond Kit syrup, after laboratory tests detected adulteration with ethylene glycol. This finding emerged during routine surveillance. It comes barely five months after India lost over 20 children in Madhya Pradesh last year due to contaminated…
Read More “When institutional reliability matters: the story of di-ethylene glycol” »
