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…
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…
Every thought you have, every face you recognise and every memory you recall is powered by an organ that consumes roughly the same amount of electricity as a dim light bulb. The human brain operates on about 20 watts of power, yet it performs tasks that continue to challenge some of the world’s most advanced…
At first glance, Mio looks like countless other small towns scattered across rural America. Fewer than 2,000 people live here and the surrounding landscape is dominated by forests and quiet roads. Yet this unassuming community in northern Michigan became the centre of one of the greatest conservation successes in modern history. Fifty years ago, the…
For decades, the Tasmanian tiger was portrayed as Australia’s most feared livestock predator. Farmers blamed it for dead sheep, newspapers described it as a menace to agriculture, and the Tasmanian government eventually paid cash rewards for its destruction. By the time the last known thylacine died at Hobart Zoo in September 1936, the species had…
Four kilometres beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, beyond the reach of sunlight and far from shipping lanes, lies a forgotten chapter of the nuclear age.Scattered across a vast stretch of seabed are more than 200,000 barrels of radioactive waste. They were lowered into the ocean over several decades during the second half of…
Anaemia was dropped from the sixth National Family Health survey launched in 2023 saying that it will be surveyed more scientifically in the Diet and Biomarkers Survey in India (DABS-I) launched in December 2022. However, the anaemia prevalence data from DABS-I is yet to be made public though it was completed in November 2025. According…
Isaac Newton (Image: Wikipedia) Most people know Isaac Newton as the man linked to the falling apple story, though historians still debate how much of that tale is fact and how much belongs to legend. What is beyond dispute is that Newton spent much of his life trying to answer a question that continues to…
