TWO recent studies on ancient DNA and migrations into South Asia appeared at the same time in two of the most prestigious journals of their disciplines, one in Science, and one in Cell. Both share a number … Read more

THE intricate war dance among the US, the Saudis and Iran on the Houthi attack on Aramco oil installations may still not spill over into a shooting war in West Asia. The Saudi defence ministry … Read more

AFTER a long, text-book Chandrayaan-2 mission since launch on June 22, right up till a mere 2 km or so above the lunar surface, the much awaited soft landing of the Vikram Lander in the … Read more

THE Amazon fires with Brazil at its epicentre, have become worldwide news. Explaining the fires recently, Douglas Morton, chief of the Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said that August 2019 stands … Read more

SAUDI Arabia, which started the Yemen war with its own coalition of the willing, is now facing the blow-back with Houthis launching a series of drone and missile attacks on infrastructure. Earlier Houthi missile attacks on Dubai … Read more

THE Netflix film, The Great Hack, relates Cambridge Analytica’s role in Trump’s 2016 elections to a much larger issue – the threat to our democracy from global tech giants.  It is not the Facebook data that Cambridge … Read more

It was one of those seminal moments in human history, when those fortunate to have been around ask “where were you when humans first landed on the Moon.” This writer was lucky to have been … Read more

INDIA’S on-going space exploration programme takes its next step with the launch on July 15, 2019 of Chandrayaan-2, the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) second venture to the moon. The first mission was mainly conducted … Read more

THE US, after walking out of the Iran accord, is now shouting foul as Iran breaches the 300 Kg enriched-uranium stockpile limit of the accord. So does the US expect Iran to live up to … Read more

FACEBOOK’S proposed currency Libra – or as a wag put it, Facebucks – has created a storm. Libertarians see Libra, a variant of a cryptocurrency backed by Facebook’s big bucks and the bevy of companies … Read more

THE New York Times recent report that the US Cyber Command has planted “malware” – read cyber bombs – deep into the Russian grid, should worry not just the Russian people, but all of us.  Taking down … Read more

THE beginning of the digital monopoly age, the age in which the digital monopolies start emerging and the neoliberal economic model has been roughly coterminous. Both come of age in the 90s. While the neoliberal … Read more