Virat Markandeya

As the sun glides on a 3.9-billion-year-old, crater-pockmarked part of the Moon around 22 September and light falls on solar panels at the cold lunar dawn, India’s sleeping Pragyan rover and Vikram lander—both part of the successful Chandrayaan-3 mission—may awaken. When the two had fallen asleep, their batteries drained, their work had already been completed through the 14 earth days of the lunar day, with the data from the lunar experiments relayed back to Earth.
Whether they will awaken, h...

Tucked away in Tamil Nadu, a state at India’s southern tip, is a facility run by members of the Irula tribe, an ethnic group known internationally for a long tradition of snake handling. Because it’s the only large-scale venom extraction facility in India, antivenom manufacturers in the country have depended on the Irula snake catchers cooperative for about 45 years.
But this dependence has created a problem that’s tough to unravel. The cooperative’s venom samples are particular to the region...

It’s evening at the northern tip of the Red Sea, in the Gulf of Aqaba, and Tom Shlesinger readies to take a dive. During the day, the seafloor is full of life and color; at night it looks much more alien. Shlesinger is waiting for a phenomenon that occurs once a year for a plethora of coral species, often several nights after the full moon.
Guided by a flashlight, he spots it: coral releasing a colorful bundle of eggs and sperm, tightly packed together. “You’re looking at it, and it starts to...

On a trip to Warsaw, Poland, in 2019, Richard Freund confronted the history of resistance against the Nazis at a Holiday Inn. Freund, an archaeologist, and professor of Jewish Studies at Christopher Newport University in Virginia, was led by the hotel manager into the basement. “Lo and behold,” Freund says, a section of the Warsaw Ghetto wall was visible.

The setup for the experiment was simple. Post-mortem spinal-cord tissue from the human brain bank of the Cervo Brain Research Center in Quebec, Canada, was cut into two longitudinal slices and then illuminated from above using a fiber laser light source.

Proceeding with the experiment, researchers collected light on the underside of the spinal cord slices...

Space-travel success inspires the growing science and technology community, but researchers still have to work around an opaque system.

The Nilgiri Hills have long been a holiday destination for tourists, yet there is something altogether more singular about the sights here.

In the food-deficient environment at the ocean floor, whale carcasses become veritable feasts. Scavengers like sleeper sharks bite and tear the soft tissue. Crustaceans colonise the exposed bones and the enriched sediments alongside.

A native subcontinental fish helps further genetic research

The quest for natural quasicrystals in Siberia, involving physicists, kalashnikovs, bears and vodka bottles.

The MC10 Biostamp provides an pointer to how electronics will integrate with the human body.

Thousands in West Bengal have gained access to arsenic-free water since 2013, with the installation of treatment tanks using porous granules developed by a team at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

Implants that dissolve in the body after they’ve done their work could solve biocompatibility problem...