Category: Science

Vegetation can cool a surface by evapotranspiration, i.e. water evaporating from soil and transpiring from leaves, carrying heat away. | Photo Credit: EqualStock/Unsplash Cities around the world are getting hotter for two reasons: the climate is warming and urban areas often trap heat more than the countryside. Planting more vegetation, especially trees, has become a…

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The story so far: Climate change is real, and for India to continue meeting domestic food demands, agriculture needs to cope with the increasing unpredictability of the weather, declining soil health, and growing air pollution. What is climate-resilient agriculture? Climate-resilient agriculture uses a range of biotechnology and complementary technologies to guide farming practices and reduce…

Read More “Why does India need climate-resilient agriculture? | Explained” »

A digital accelerometer from a Motorola Xoom smartphone. | Photo Credit: Raimond Spekking (CC BY-SA) A: Your smartphone knows which way is up due to its accelerometer. It’s a chip whose parts shift slightly when the phone accelerates or when gravity acts along a particular direction. The phone’s software reads the accelerometer’s measurements along the…

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Over the last two decades, a small shelf of Indian nonfiction has treated the city itself as an environmental object. Jyoti Pande Lavakare’s Breathing Here is Injurious to Your Health and Siddharth Singh’s The Great Smog of India explored North India’s atmospheric pollution as a human-made crisis with human costs sustained by official short-termism and…

Read More “What Delhi’s wilderness says about the city’s politics” »

Frail participants were more likely to be female, have higher body weight, live with multiple long-term conditions, and lower educational attainment. They were also 2.5 times more likely to be diagnosed with dementia |Image used for representational purpose only | Photo Credit: THULASI KAKKAT Older adults who are frail and have depression could be at…

Read More “Frailty, depression in older adults may together account for 17 % of dementia risk: Study” »

For much of the past decade, study abroad was discussed in India in terms of momentum. Numbers rose year after year, destinations multiplied, and overseas education came to be seen as an almost automatic pathway to global opportunity. In 2025, that narrative began to change. Applications softened across several markets, visa rules tightened or were…

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In October 2020, when the world was beginning to come out of a global lockdown, a spacecraft more than 3 lakh km away performed a pogo-stick jump on a small asteroid called Bennu and collected samples of its surface. The craft, part of NASA’s OSIRIS REx, then launched itself away from the asteroid and towards…

Read More “Earthlife is made of space stuff, studies of asteroid Bennu hint” »