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…
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…
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…
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…
Success has a way of attracting attention. A student tops an examination, and messages pour in. An entrepreneur builds a thriving company, and suddenly everyone wants to hear their story. An athlete wins a championship, and cameras follow their every move. Society loves a winner. It always has.Yet Neil deGrasse Tyson‘s observation points towards something…
A spacecraft drifting past Neptune would not need much imagination to picture diamonds forming in its atmosphere. Deep inside ice giants, carbon compounds are squeezed under pressures that break molecular bonds and reorganise atoms into crystalline structures. In lab experiments and planetary simulations, scientists have modelled this “diamond rain” for decades, and missions like NASA’s…
Carl Rogers (Image: Wikipedia) There is a moment that arrives for many people after they leave school or university. The exams are over. The certificates have been collected. The years of structured learning come to an end. For a while, it can feel as though education itself has finished.Then life gets involved.A job changes. Technology…
Jane Goodall (Image: Wikipedia) Some quotes feel unusual because they move against instinct. The line often attributed to Jane Goodall is one of them.When people encounter behaviour they strongly disagree with, the natural reaction is often criticism. Sometimes it is anger. Sometimes it is avoidance. In many situations, people simply stop talking to one another…
Charles Darwin (Image: Wikipedia) Some quotes stay popular because they sound wise. Others survive because people keep seeing them play out in everyday life. The statement often linked to Charles Darwin belongs to the second group.You do not need to study biology to understand why it continues to resonate. Anyone who has watched the world…
