Science

For decades, a vast region south of India has quietly refused to make sense. Satellites mapping Earth’s shape kept returning the same unsettling result: the ocean surface there sits noticeably lower than it should, as if something invisible is pulling it down from below. Ships passing through would never notice anything unusual, yet space-based measurements…

Inside factories, data centres and power plants, heat is usually treated as a problem rather than a resource. It drifts away in plumes, warms the surrounding air, and disappears into the atmosphere with little thought given to its potential. Yet some engineers are now circling back to that wasted energy and asking a slightly unusual…

A major chemical emergency in Garden Grove, Orange County, has forced around 40,000 residents to leave their homes after a storage tank at the GKN Aerospace facility began overheating and releasing hazardous vapours. The chemical inside the tank is methyl methacrylate, or MMA, a volatile industrial liquid used in plastics and resin manufacturing. Officials warned…

Brian Cox (Image: Wikipedia) Something is interesting about human beings that appears very early in life. Children ask endless questions before they know anything about science, philosophy or technology. They ask where stars go during the day. They ask why the sky changes colours in the evening. They ask why birds fly, why oceans seem…

Gold has fascinated civilisations for millennia because of one remarkable quality: it rarely loses its shine. Ancient coins, jewellery and royal artefacts buried for thousands of years can still emerge gleaming with their familiar golden glow. Scientists have long known that gold resists corrosion better than most metals, but the exact atomic mechanisms behind this…

Imagine an ocean so enormous it stretched across half the planet, wider than the Atlantic, older than the Himalayas, home to creatures we’ve only read about in history books. It was called the Tethys Ocean, and for hundreds of millions of years, it sat between the ancient landmasses that would eventually become Europe, Africa, and…

The link between artificial light at night, street lights, light pollution, biodiversity destruction, nocturnal fauna, bats, insects, and birds is becoming more evident in modern environmental science. It has been suggested that too much light during the night not only causes comfort for humans but also becomes a serious threat to the environment. Research concerning…

What began as a question about polluted drinking water has now turned three Indian teenagers into internationally recognised young innovators. Sixteen-year-olds Vivaan Chhawchharia, Ariana Agarwal and Avyana Mehta have been named the Asia winners of The Earth Prize 2026 for creating ‘Plas-Stick’, a biodegradable solution which removes microplastics from water using powdered tamarind seeds. Inspired…

For 25 years, the ISS was the only address humans kept beyond Earth. It is closing. What replaces it is not one station; it is an orbital economy, built by private companies and designed to manufacture things that cannot be made on the ground.In November 2000, two Russian cosmonauts and one American astronaut moved into…

Viktor Frankl (Image: Wikipedia) People usually imagine that difficult situations are what make life unbearable. It sounds like a reasonable assumption because it matches what most of us see around us. Financial stress weighs people down. Illness changes families. Relationships break. Careers take unexpected turns. Some periods feel unfair even when someone has done everything…