Vishwam Sankaran

“It all happened in a span of 5 to 7 minutes,” says Hemal Rajesh Doshi, one of the 195 passengers aboard the Boeing 737-800 flight operated by Indian airline SpiceJet that encountered severe turbulence flying to Kolkata from Mumbai on 1 May this year.
The incident left 14 passengers and three of the flight’s cabin crew injured.
“About an hour and a half into the flight, without any announcement, it was like the plane suddenly fell and passengers were in panic. I saw about four to five passeng...

On a warm summer evening in April, a group of class eight students from a government corporation school in the southern Indian city of Chennai hosted a play titled Time for Change.

The student group that goes by the name Thenikuzhu – meaning a bee swarm inTamil – wrote the script for the climate change-themed play themselves and performed for a packed auditorium, with tickets selling for about $2 each.

Tenikuzhu’s science-fiction play involves a diverse group of scientists, who invent a time ...

In June this year, a stray dog entered a maternity ward in a private hospital in India’s busy northern city of Panipat in the early hours of the morning and picked up a newborn from beside its sleeping mother.

The family found the three-day-old’s body the next day outside the hospital, presumably mauled to death by a pack of dogs.

This is a common enough occurrence in India to warrant British veterinarian Andy Gibson to launch a mission over the last decade to eradicate rabies in the country ...

In major cities like Mumbai, men’s public toilets outnumber women’s by 25 to one, a stark divide that prevents many female workers from considering jobs as delivery agents or taxi drivers. Experts tell

Vennapusa Narayanamma is nothing short of a celebrity in Nizampet, a satellite city on the outskirts of Hyderabad in southern India. Dubbed the “Auto Rani” (“rani” meaning “queen”), she was one of the first women ever to obtain an auto-rickshaw driver’s licence in the city.

That was about 15 ye...

From the time he was about 10, British fisheries scientist Adrian Pinder hoped he could travel to India one day to catch the fish of his dreams.
Growing up reading angling magazines in the UK, he was fascinated by the hump-backed mahseer – a mighty orange-finned freshwater fish that grows to about 1.5m in length and weighs more than 50kg – which is endemic to the Kaveri river in southern India.
“I couldn’t believe they grew to such a size. So they always fascinated me, and I promised myself t...

About 100 years ago, on May 15, 1921, multiple fires broke out in electricity and telegraph control rooms in several parts of the world, including in the US and the UK.

In New York City, it was from a switch-board at the Brewster station that quickly spread to destroy the whole building, and in Sweden, operators at Karlstad exchange first experienced equipment malfunction and faint smoke, then after a period of quiet the main fire started, leading to extensive equipment damage, studies say.

S...

reports from Chennai
When reported cases of Covid-19 began rising sharply in parts of the Indian state of Maharashtra in early March, PhD candidate Bani Jolly from the CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) in Delhi began noticing mutations in the novel coronavirus samples from the region.
These were changes in the virus genome that had been reported previously in the context of “antibody escape,” or the ability of the virus to evade the activity of the body’s immune system...

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How to prevent the next pandemic? As 2021 begins with COVID-19 continuing its global spread, scientists have spotlighted three approaches to at least reduce the risk of pandemic potential diseases -- screening animals, reducing land-use change and improving health infrastructure.
There can be no one answer to the question at the centre of an anxious debate across a world coping with COVID-19 and wondering what will happen if another one comes, but the glo...

In the late 1950s, people in the south Indian town of Shimoga started reporting mysterious deaths of dozens of monkeys in the evergreen forests of the district.

Soon people in villages surrounding the forest also began reporting high fever, vomiting, diarrhea, body pain, headache, and blood in the stool as well as a few deaths, prompting officials to initiate a surveillance project, suspecting that this deadly disease was coming from birds.

Scientists from India’s then-newly established ‘Viru...

Veterinary scientists in India have detected the novel coronavirus in the carcass of a wild Indian leopard cub, marking the first reported instance of the viral infection in a free roaming wild feline.
The yet-to-be peer-reviewed research, posted in the preprint server bioRxiv, revealed that the one-year-old cub, which was found dead in mid-October, just months after the second wave of the pandemic in India had receded, was infected with the Delta variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
These findin...

A herd of over 15 Asian elephants in China has for weeks attracted global attention for straying away from their natural habitat, covering more than 500km across the country in the last year, as scientists try to understand the unusual behaviour of the mammoth beasts.
The elephants began their journey from Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve near the border with Myanmar and Laos, and were last spotted near the city of Yuxi, showing signs of travelling south.
But it is unclear what they will...

Freeze-dried mouse sperm stored on board the International Space Station (ISS) for almost six years did not undergo any DNA damage and continued to produce “healthy space pups”, a new study has found.
According to the scientists, the findings shed more light on whether mammals, including humans, can reproduce in space.
Combined with experiments on the ground exposing mice sperm to X rays, the research, published Friday in the journal Science Advances, found that mammalian sperm cells could be...

An avalanche of rock and ice set off the chain of events that severely damaged two hydropower plants and left more than 200 people dead or missing in Uttarakhand, India in February, according to a new study.

While earlier research had ruled that the disaster was caused by a massive rockslide, dismissing speculation that it was triggered by a glacial lake bursting, this study details the sequence of events that left a huge trail of destruction across the Himalayan landscape.

According to an in...

A military drone may have autonomously attacked humans for the first time without being instructed to do so, according to a recent report by the UN Security Council.
The report, published in March, claimed that the AI drone – Kargu-2 quadcopter – produced by Turkish military tech company STM, attacked retreating soldiers loyal to Libyan General Khalifa Haftar.
The 548-page report by the UN Security Council’s Panel of Experts on Libya has not delved into details on if there were any deaths due...

Scientists say the Covid-19 pandemic should serve as a wake-up call for the biggest overhaul of urban planning for public health in almost 200 years.
Writing in an article published in the journal Science on Thursday, a group of 39 scientists say governments must intervene to enforce better ventilation as part of the planning code for public buildings, in order to prevent future pandemics.
They point to the example of the cholera epidemics in 19th century London, when a young lawyer and socia...