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
A group of Haenyeo women on Jeju Island, September 2012. | Photo Credit: Idobi (CC BY-SA) A new study has presented evidence of both genetic adaptation and physiological changes among the Haenyeo, a unique group of women in South Korea’s Jeju Island known for diving up to 10 m underwater and up to seven hours … Read more
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
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
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
Daily Quiz | On Space Firsts 1 / 7 | Who was the first woman in space in 1963? 2 / 7 | What first was achieved on November 3, 1957? Answer : The dog Laika, the first living creature, was launched into space by USSR DID YOU KNOW THE ANSWER? YES NO SHOW ANSWER … Read more
The cause of last week’s massive power outage in Spain and Portugal remains unclear but it has shone a spotlight on solar and wind energy, which critics accuse of straining electricity grids. The rise of renewables presents a challenge for power grids, which must evolve to adapt as countries move away from fossil fuels. Maintaining … Read more
From breathtaking snapshots of distant galaxies to game-changing discoveries about the universe’s expansion, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has dazzled humankind for 35 years. After launching on April 24, 1990, Hubble overcame early flaws to become one of NASA’s greatest triumphs. Its vivid images and countless scientific breakthroughs have reshaped our understanding of the cosmos, … Read more
Image used for representational purpose. | Photo Credit: S.R. Raghunathan The story so far: The office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India, Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the Centre for Technology, Innovation, and Economic Research have released a detailed assessment of public-funded research and development in India. In all, 244 … Read more
In his 1997 book ‘Dominance Without Hegemony’, historian Ranajit Guha recounted how Mahatma Gandhi, “perhaps India’s foremost ideologue of self-discipline”, created an “elaborate” set of rules about how people should behave around him as they travelled the country. To Gandhi, Guha wrote, a haphazard crowd was “unmanageable”, “uncontrollable”, “undisciplined”, and ultimately entailed a “mobocracy”. Gandhi … Read more