1. Despite rising taxes, cigarettes in India have become more affordable “Over the past few years, the Indian government has been stepping up efforts to reduce tobacco consumption by hiking taxes on cigarettes. In February, finance…
If you’re one of the millennials, you’re expected to not know about the Casiotron almost by definition – but you probably do. It was a Casio digital watch first sold in October 1974, and its…
The GSLV Developmental-flight 6 launch by the Indian Space Research Organisation on August 27 was three things: the launch of the GSAT 6 satellite for the Indian military, the fifth successful launch of a GSLV…
Too many things to do at work this last week, so much so that I missed writing/blogging on a bunch of articles and papers that in other circumstances I’d have loved to discuss. Here they…
Two years ago, a study in Science put a detailed analysis behind an idea that had already taken root on a lot of people’s minds: that the unfavourable weather conditions climate change was creating around…
The collaborative coding platform GitHub became the subject of a DDoS attack on August 25, its second this year after having been targeted by a massive attack in March. The issue first appeared at 3.05 pm…
Apologies for the unplanned summer holiday, but we’re back! 1. Was the tumour inside her brain her twin? (Audio) She moved from Hyderabad to do her PhD at Indiana University and began experiencing headaches and suffering from…
During its formation, Venus was in the Solar System’s habitable zone – much like Earth is now. Scientists think its surface contained liquid water, and its atmosphere was somewhat like Earth’s. Maybe there was life,…
The software working behind the robotic voice of Stephen Hawking was released for public use on August 18 by Intel, the company that developed it. Although principally developed for Hawking, the ‘tool’ has since been made…
The next time you smell a whiff of rot in your morning’s eggs, you might not want to throw them away. Instead, you might do better to realise what you’re smelling could be a superconductor…
The Tianjin warehouse blasts on August 12 caused a weak surface quake in the Chinese port city, made houses uninhabitable in a 2-km radius, absolutely decimated a parking lot of 8,000 cars in its vicinity, blew a…
The Department of Biotechnology, under the Ministry of Science & Technology, is soliciting feedback on the Human DNA Profiling Bill, a scanned copy of which has been uploaded to the DBT website – accessible here. It is…