Aliens are real. Or maybe not. The possibility of mystical beings watching over us or even walking among us is not just the ramblings of the fringe and Reddit users, but a key political and societal debate in the U.S. President Donald Trump, on Thursday, February 19, 2026, announced that he was directing the Pentagon … Read more
Mathematicians have announced a milestone in the effort to thoroughly verify the solution of the sphere-packing problem — for which the Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska won the Fields Medal in 2022 — using a machine. This version of the problem asks what the best way is to pack a bunch of spheres in eight dimensions. … Read more
The science of taste The Miracle Berry contains a compound called miraculin that binds to sweet receptors and can make acidic foods like lemon taste sweet for about an hour. START THE QUIZ 1 / 5 | You don’t ‘taste’ most of what you call taste. Instead, a large share of the flavour comes from … Read more
In 1987, four years after the discovery of HIV as the causative agent of AIDS, scientists reported the first drug effective against the virus, called zidovudine. Zidovudine targeted a viral enzyme called reverse transcriptase, and prevented the virus from completing its life-cycle. However, zidovudine was no magic bullet. It could hold the virus at bay … Read more
The story so far: India and Brazil signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on rare earths and critical minerals during President Lula da Silva’s state visit to India on February 21, 2026. The joint statement said the two countries want to work together across the full mineral “value chain” and that the understanding includes exploration, … Read more
Hand preference reflects how the brain organises movement control | Photo Credit: Kelly Sikkema/Unsplash — Gayatri Chandrashekar A: There’s a neural basis for handedness but it’s not due to any single part of the brain. Hand preference reflects how the brain organises movement control. In most right-handed people, the left hemisphere has stronger control over … Read more
In a 1953 experiment, two scientists named Stanley Miller and Harold Urey attempted to recreate the conditions of the early earth long before life existed. They showed that organic molecules such as amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, could form spontaneously in the conditions that prevailed on a primitive earth, 3.5-4 billion years ago. … Read more
When Isaac Newton wrote Opticks, published in 1704, he divided the colour spectrum into the now famous VIBGYOR, a set of seven colours (the decision was not, as such, scientific because Newton’s choice was dictated by ‘7’ being a significant number in alchemy.) What Newton observed was a series of hues merging into one another, … Read more
In many animals, sex is decided by obvious physical differences in the chromosomes. But in ants, bees, and wasps, sex is often decided in a more unusual way: by whether an embryo carries two different versions of a specific DNA region or two matching ones. Two studies, one in Science Advances in 2024 and the … Read more
“Scientists have long known that emotional states such as stress and anxiety can influence the intensity of these sensations. While the neural mechanisms linking stress and pain have been studied extensively, the effect of stress on itch has remained poorly understood,” IISc said. File | Photo Credit: The Hindu Researchers at the Indian Institute of … Read more