In the summer of 1967, a 24-year-old PhD student at the University of Cambridge noticed something unusual hidden within mountains of radio telescope data. The signal appeared as a regular pulse, repeating with astonishing precision and refusing to fit any known astronomical explanation. For months, scientists struggled to understand what they were seeing, even joking…
BENGALURU: In a renewed push to hand over Isro’s LVM-3 launch vehicle to private industry, space regulator-cum-promoter Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) has invited expressions of interest (EoI) for the transfer of technology (ToT) of the country’s heaviest operational rocket.The move comes more than two years after Space PSU NewSpace India Limited…
A meteorite picked up from the sands of the Sahara has begun to complicate the quiet assumptions scientists often make about the early solar system. It is not the sort of object that draws attention at first glance, just a dark fragment of rock with odd mineral flecks caught under a microscope. Yet inside it…
BENGALURU: For decades, scientists trying to understand the Martian surface have relied largely on models that treat the planet as if it were relatively flat. These models have helped explain how temperatures change through the day and across seasons, but they often miss something important: Mars is not flat.A team of researchers from Isro’s Physical…
A sealed vial of sediment pulled from Yukon permafrost does not look like a breakthrough. It looks like dirt until the sequencing results arrive. Inside it, scientists from institutions including McMaster University and the University of Alberta found genetic traces of mammoths, horses, and predators that have not roamed the Arctic for tens of thousands…
June 2026 is shaping up to be one of the most rewarding months of the year for skywatchers, with a rare lunar occultation of Venus, a three-planet gathering in the evening sky, the arrival of astronomical summer, and a growing collection of deep-sky targets rising into view after dark. The highlight falls on 17 June,…
Marie Curie (Image: Wikipedia) When people talk about Marie Curie today, they usually start at the end of the story. The Nobel Prizes. The scientific breakthroughs. The place she occupies among the giants of modern science.The beginning was far less glamorous.Before the world knew her name, Curie was a young woman in Russian-controlled Poland, a…
In July 2013, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano found himself in a situation no astronaut ever wants to face. While performing a spacewalk outside the International Space Station, water began leaking into his helmet. What initially seemed like sweat soon turned into a life-threatening emergency as the water rose around his face, impairing his vision and…
Roughly four kilometres below the surface of the central Pacific Ocean, scattered across a stretch of seafloor the size of the continental United States, lie hundreds of billions of apple-sized rocks. They are dark, lumpy, and almost impossibly slow-growing, a few millimetres every million years. Some of the ones sitting on the seabed today began…
Every year, the world generates hundreds of millions of tonnes of plastic waste, and the vast majority of it ends up in places where it is not useful. A landmark 2025 study published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, which conducted a global trade-linked material flow analysis of plastics for 2022, found that the global…
