Science

​Naina and Nayantara Singh developed the low-cost plant-based water filter. What if some of the ingredients sitting in a kitchen cupboard could help tackle pollutants that conventional water filters struggle with? For Delhi-NCR twins Naina and Nayantara Singh, that question became the starting point for a nearly year-long scientific experiment. The Class XII students have…

Why Paris’ Eiffel Tower Gets Taller When Temperatures Soar: The Simple Scientific Reason Behind Its Unexpected Seasonal Change (Canva) The Eiffel Tower looks as solid and unchanging as a monument can possibly be. Yet, on a hot summer day, Paris’ most famous landmark can actually become slightly taller.There is no new section being added, of…

Delhi’s Yamuna is all set for a much-awaited green makeover. The Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) has started replicating a forest-reclamation experiment that was successfully carried out in the coal-mining belt of Dhanbad, Jharkhand. As per a recent report on the initiative, about 100 CISF personnel planted 1,000 fruit-bearing and medicinal trees and one lakh…

Mythreya DharaniPhoto credit: Society for Science Mythreya Dharani’s achievements in the high school science research arena are few and far between. The Society for Science, which organizes the prestigious Regeneron Science Talent Search, announced that 18-year-old Mythreya from New Jersey developed an AI model to predict how individual tumors would respond to the chemotherapy drug…

A new snake species discovered in the jungle has been named after Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash (Image credit: Chris Austin via Field Museum) A newly described snake from the forests of New Guinea has been given a name familiar to rock fans around the world. Scientists have named the non-venomous species Lielaphis slashi, or…

Groundwater reserves beneath High Mountain Asia (HMA) often called the ‘Asian water tower’ are depleting at an alarming rate, according to a new satellite-based study. The region provides water that supports farming, cities, and ecosystems in more than a dozen downstream countries and is a critical resource for hundreds of millions of people. But as…

PC: NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)/Handout via REUTERS Nearly 12 billion years ago, the Milky Way was still in its infancy, assembling itself from smaller collections of stars, gas and dark matter. During that turbulent period, another galaxy came within its gravitational reach and was eventually absorbed, leaving traces that have survived to the present…

Sophie Adenot’s first spacewalk was supposed to be about replacing an antenna. Instead, the 18 August outing left the French astronaut with two milestones to carry back inside the International Space Station: becoming the first French woman to walk in space, and an unfinished repair that will require another trip outside. Adenot and Nasa astronaut…

PC: Dhruv Varun Cohen ’26/Cornell University Thousands of hours of rainforest recordings are helping scientists teach artificial intelligence to recognise Amazonian birds that can be difficult to identify by sound alone. In Colombia, Cornell researchers have been collecting acoustic data from cattle ranches, rubber agroforestry plots and forest to build a clearer picture of which…

Image: Society for Science/Chris Ayers Photography At just 18, Jaeho Lee has already taken on a mathematical problem that reaches far beyond the classroom. A student at Spring Branch Academic Institute in Houston, Texas, Lee was named one of the 40 finalists in the 2026 Regeneron Science Talent Search, after studying the structure of affine…

PC: Long overdue: a new, widespread, species of Pristimantis (Anura, Strabomantidae) from the Chocó region and the synonymy of Pristimantis subsigillatus​ For more than a century, a frog living across the forests of western Ecuador and southern Colombia carried the wrong scientific name. It was not hidden in some unexplored corner of the rainforest, either….

For centuries, lake sturgeon have moved quietly through the rivers and lakes of the Great Lakes region, growing slowly and aging in a way that has been difficult to measure. Their lives can stretch far beyond those of most freshwater fish, but just how far has remained uncertain. New research now suggests that some may…

In a vineyard in Italy’s Puglia region, rows of grapevines grew beneath something more usually associated with power stations than agriculture: photovoltaic panels. The arrangement changed the amount of sunlight reaching the vines, but it also altered what was happening much closer to the ground. Soil stayed wetter, temperatures were less extreme and the air…

​Representative Image of an apple orchard with solar panels providing shade while generating electricity (AI-generated image) In 2022, researchers running a field experiment in southern France found that moving solar panels installed above an apple orchard sharply reduced sunburn damage on the fruit. The system, known as a dynamic agrivoltaic setup, tilts photovoltaic panels through…

Snow-covered mountain ranges of the Montagne Noire. Image Credit: Von Christian Ferrer/Wikipedia Nearly 400 fossils discovered in southern France are giving scientists a detailed view of marine life that lived close to the South Pole about 470 million years ago. The fossils belong to the newly described Cabrières Biota, an Early Ordovician fossil site in…

What happened to the reindeer on St. Matthew Island is a classic story of wildlife boom and bust. In 1944, the US Coast Guard corralled 29 Nunivak Island reindeer on a barge and floated the animals north to the island, more than 200 miles away to one of the most remote places in Alaska. While…

Harmful algal blooms can turn freshwater ecosystems into dangerous environments, but researchers at Florida Atlantic University are developing a novel way to tackle one of the nutrients that helps drive them, excess phosphorus. Rather than removing algae after a bloom has already formed, the team is developing 3D-printed adsorbent structures designed to capture phosphate directly…

On Ishigaki Island, cane toads have been living in conditions quite different from those faced by the populations from which they came. The island is warm, wet and separated from mainland habitats, and the animals introduced there in the late 1970s have now had several decades to establish themselves. When scientists compared these Japanese toads…

An aggressive campaign using commercial nets and angler bounties helped turn around a decade-long fight against non-native predators in northern Idaho’s largest lake. By 2016, ten years after the Idaho Department of Fish and Game (IDFG) began its suppression programme on Lake Pend Oreille, the number of adult lake trout had fallen by 64 per…

In a significant development, a Bengaluru cancer centre has begun using Karnataka’s first Elekta Unity MR-Linac bringing MR-guided adaptive radiation therapy to the state. The HealthCare Global Enterprises (HCG) in the city has started treating patients with the new technology. As per HCG’s August 18, 2026 announcement and Elekta’s technical information, the system combines a…