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India could be technologically capable of “quantum communication” using satellites in the “next half a decade” Professor Bhaskar Kanseri of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Delhi, whose team recently reported an instance of quantum key distribution one kilometre apart — the farthest such transmission in India, without any connecting cables — told The Hindu in … Read more

Close-up view of air bubbles in a variety of shapes frozen inside a mass of ice. | Photo Credit: Dominic Bazinet/Unsplash For as long as humans have lived, they’ve found ways to store information for others to find. Cave paintings were perhaps the first examples, followed later by messages in bottles, semaphore, books, persistent URLs, … Read more

Charon’s discovery The story of Charon’s discovery takes us back to 1978 – a time when even astronomers were still thinking that Pluto was a planet. Little was known about Pluto and its system, but all that was about to change in the decades that followed. On the morning of June 22, American astronomer … Read more

By the time Nishant Narayanasamy joined Shashi Thutupalli’s lab at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bengaluru in 2019, the lab had a new guest: a yeast colony that had seemingly grown way beyond its expected size. The snowflake yeast had been shipped from William Ratcliff’s laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology … Read more

A farmer works at a maize field in a village bordering Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, April 20, 2025. | Photo Credit: G.N. Rao/The Hindu For every 1º C rise in average temperature worldwide, the per person availability of calories will fall 4% of what’s recommended by 2100. Most major staple crops, including rice, wheat, sorghum, maize, and … Read more

The conditions required for a clear ENSO signal only emerge in early summer, so forecasts before then quickly lose value. | Photo Credit: Joshua Eckl/Unsplash A: The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a climate phenomenon with three phases: warm, cool, and neutral. Depending on the phase in a year, ENSO affects the climate in … Read more

ISRO’s Small Satellite Launch Vehicle-03 (SSLV-D3) leaves a trail of smoke after it lifts off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota on August 16, 2024. Photo: X/@isro via PTI The Hindustan Aeronautics Limited has bagged a Transfer of Technology (ToT) deal, valued at ₹511 crore, from the Indian Space Research Organisation, to build … Read more

Scientists from IIT-Delhi and the DRDO recently demonstrated a key advance in quantum cybersecurity that stands to revolutionise how the world will communicate in the future. The world’s secrets are currently stored and communicated via channels that are protected by difficult mathematical problems. Over the years, an increasing amount of computing power available to certain … Read more

Feeling like falling Ever experienced the illusory sense of falling? When you fall asleep, you feel you’re entire body drop as the air screams past you. You may or may not know what caused this in the first place. You might have been standing on a solid floor when the ground unexpectedly gave out. You … Read more

(This article forms a part of the Science for All newsletter that takes the jargon out of science and puts the fun in! Subscribe now!) Krill (Euphausia superba) are transparent marine organisms. Each krill is the size of a matchbox but they travel the open seas in swarms of several thousands. They are prey to … Read more