BUSINESS

In the industrial town of Morbi in Gujarat, the air usually hums with the roar of gas-fired kilns producing millions of square metres of ceramic tiles. Today, however, nearly a quarter of the town’s ceramic units have gone silent. Nearly a thousand kilometres away in Ludhiana, Punjab, one of India’s largest hosiery and knitwear clusters … Read more

As Tamil Nadu approaches its Assembly elections, its ambition to become a $1-trillion economy and its position as one of India’s leading industrial and knowledge hubs means it’s worth examining how the State has invested in science and environmental issues in the last five years. First, the State’s strategy on environment and climate action has … Read more

A long-standing intervention by the Assam government to reduce crop depredation by elephants in its forest regions, piloted and designed by environmental non-government organisation World Wildlife Fund (WWF), is actually associated with more accidental elephant deaths, a study in Conservation Biology has reported. Launched in 2003 in Sonitpur district, the anti-depredation squads (ADS) of Assam … Read more

The Centre’s rollback of the revision to India’s earthquake zoning by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), follows a major challenge to the methodology used, which some engineers believe are out of sync with site-based evaluations. Yet, the reversal is driven largely by the massive cost and execution implications, as the decision impacts urban planning, … Read more

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972) was a Bengali statistician and institution-builder who became one of the most consequential figures in twentieth-century Indian science. Trained as a physicist in Calcutta and Cambridge, he discovered statistics almost by accident through an encounter with Biometrika, and went on to found the Indian Statistical Institute in 1931 out of a … Read more

It’s possible to travel faster than light in a particular medium. | Photo Credit: Logan Voss/Unsplash – Sai Karthikeya Duggirala Albert Einstein’s equation E = mc2 says energy and mass are linked. If you push an object to go faster, you add energy to it. At everyday speeds, this just increases the object’s velocity. But … Read more

Researchers have found a way to hijack the natural protein-making facilities of bacteria to manufacture specific proteins of interest. They did this by turning a ‘nutrient gate’ on a bacterial cell into a Trojan horse that could ferry artificial amino acids into cells to make these proteins. The study, conducted by teams at ETH Zurich … Read more