Scientists create first ‘pangenome’ of Asian rice

Asian cultivated rice (Oryza sativa L.) is one of the most important food crops in the world. Representative image. | Photo Credit: Sandy Ravaloniaina/Unsplash Scientists have assembled a first of its kind ‘pangenome’, a kind of reference genome, by stitching together key parts of genomes from 144 varieties of wild and cultivated varieties of rice … Read more

Successful urban birds sport different colours from unsuccessful ones

In 2016, when Juan Diego Ibáñez-Álamo at the University of Granada in Spain met Kaspar Delhey, an expert in bird coloration at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, a new collaboration was born. “He suggested we study whether urbanisation is associated with differences in bird coloration,” Delhey said. Many studies have investigated how urban … Read more

Why does our temperature go up when we are ill?

A: The increase in core temperature observed during illness is commonly called fever and occurs in response to infection by a pathogen or certain types of physical injury. When a person becomes infected with bacteria, the white blood cells of the immune system recognise the incoming pathogen as foreign and initiate the first stages of … Read more

Parachutes for uncrewed spaceflight of Gaganyaan mission flagged off

Representative purposes. | Photo Credit: DRDO A set of parachutes developed for the first uncrewed mission of India’s Gaganyaan human spaceflight programme was shipped from Agra on Monday (May 5, 2025). The parachutes were developed by the Aerial Delivery Research and Development Establishment (ADRDE), an Agra-based laboratory under the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). … Read more

AI: is India falling behind?

The Government of India and a clutch of startups have set their sights on creating an indigenous foundational Artificial Intelligence large language model (LLM), along the lines of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Meta’s Llama. Foundational AI, or LLMs, are manually trained systems that can churn out responses to queries. Training them requires large amounts … Read more