Gravitational waves are a reality, according to scientists from an institution that has been hoping to observe them. “We have detected gravitational waves. We did it,” said David Reitze, executive director of LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. The discovery, based on ripples in space-time detected by LIGO, supports a prediction made by Albert Einstein that’s essential to his general theory of relativity. The ripples LIGO detected are based on […]

As a school counselor in Malmo, Sweden, Pooja Sharafi has heard more than his fair share of suffering. Roughly one quarter of his kids at Sofielundsskolan are “new arrivals,” meaning they came to Sweden in the past four years. Many of them fled wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya or Afghanistan. Many have gone through hell to get here. Earlier this month, however, Sharafi heard something he had never encountered from […]

Harry Potter director David Yates is back after a gap of 5 years with his reimagining of The Legend of Tarzan. The first trailer was just released by Warner Bros. and it is suitably epic and grand. Alexander Skarsgard stars as Tarzan and Margot Robbie as his beloved Jane (2016 is going to be a big year for her with this and Suicide Squad). This new take finds Tarzan living […]

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men may not have been able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Perhaps they should have handed the job over to these incredible elephants who worked as a team to rescue a calf from their herd stuck in a waterhole. Footage captured at South Africa’s Kruger National Park shows a tiny baby elephant stuck in a shallow ditch of muddy water. […]

A bicycle that produces electricity when pedalled might sound like an idea straight out of science fiction, but billionaire philanthropist Manoj Bhargava would disagree. Bhargava who showed off a prototype of his ‘electricity-creating cycle,’ plans to launch the same in India by March 2016. Named Free Electric, since creating electricity via this stationary bicycle would be technically free, the product will be priced in the Rs 12,000 – 15,000 segment […]

If you can download files, movies and video games in a lightening-speed, internet will really be a joy, won’t it? A new technology called light fidelity (Li-Fi) can achieve speed of 1GBps, making it 100 times faster than the speed of regular Wi-fi. Harald Haas, Chair of Mobile Communications, at the University of Edinburgh, is the brain behind this Li-Fi project. Haas, by flickering the light from an LED shows […]

The dangerous skies over Syria have now earned their reputation. The Turkish foreign ministry has confirmed that its forces had shot down a fighter aircraft near the Turkish border with Syria. The Russian foreign ministry confirmed soon afterwards that it has lost an SU-24 over Syria. The situation remains tense: Two crew members were filmed ejecting from the stricken aircraft – early reports from Reuters said it had video of […]

Whether you caught a glimpse of it while flicking through the morning papers, walking past the newsstand, or while looking over at a fellow commuter on the train with his/her head buried in the newspaper, it’s unlikely you missed this advertisement today. Emblazoned with the words ‘Free electricity is coming’, the ad refers to a film on philanthropist Manoj Bhargava’s project Billions in Change — more specifically, a film about […]

NASA is known to make various discoveries, but this is one discovery that happened in the most unlikeliest of places – the deserts of Kazakhstan. The International Space Station has released satellite images of some 8000-year-old ancient settlements in the desert of Kazakhstan. The photos have sparked new interest in the archaeological sites and could lead to new discoveries regarding the purpose of these prehistoric configurations. The feat comes in […]

Crucial measurements were made at the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector in Japan The discovery that neutrinos switch between different “flavours” has won the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics. Neutrinos are ubiquitous subatomic particles with almost no mass and which rarely interact with anything else, making them very difficult to study. Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald led two teams which made key observations of the particles inside big underground instruments in Japan […]