A multi-national team of scientists spanning Asia, Europe, South America and Australasia, including researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, have surveyed nearly 17,000 people across 39 countries to understand why interpersonal relationships differ between societies.

Do you remember poking a plant that quickly closed its leaves, seemed to droop and shy away? An introvert among plants and a favourite among all of us, the touch-me-not or chuimui in Hindi, is aptly named Mimosa pudica by scientists, where pudica is Latin for shy or chaste. We have all enjoyed seeing it fall asleep; probably wondering what happened inside the plant and perhaps waiting with curiosity for it to reopen!

On April 26 2019, scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Virgo Interferometer detected gravitational waves from a possible black hole-neutron star collision thought to have taken place 1.2 billion light years away. The event was observed by both LIGO observatories, based in Louisiana and Washington state in the USA, and the Virgo facility based in the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) in Italy.

Melting glaciers, rising sea levels and the threat to biodiversity are some of the conspicuous impacts of global warming. However, the repercussions of this warming are multifaceted and complex than what we understand today.

Researchers from IISER, Tirupati, ATREE, Bengaluru, Hume Centre for Ecology and Wildlife Biology, Kerala and The Gandhigram Rural Institute, Tamil Nadu, studied the factors responsible for the deleterious effects on the Shola grasslands of the Western Ghats.

SLC-IT, along with researchers from Panthera, New York, USA, have attempted to model the conditions for a suitable habitat for snow leopards in Ladakh. Known as the ‘snow leopard capital of the world’, Ladakh is thought to harbour 60% of the snow leopard population in India. In this first-of-its-kind study, they have used data from direct observations and camera traps.

Researchers from IISc studied whether urban environments adversely affect the health and fitness of urban lizards.

Jumping spider Anarrhotus sp. found to build an orb-web as a nocturnal retreat, unusual for a spider from the Salticidae family. 

The changing climate is taking a toll everywhere on the planet, and the fragile, biodiversity-rich ecosystems of the Himalayas are no exception. In a recent study, researchers from the CSIR-National Environmental Engineering Research Institute, Nagpur, and Society for Conserving Planet and Life, Uttarakhand, have reported how changes in the Himalayan climate could affect the habitat of seabuckthorn, a medicinal plant which grows in the region.

Nearly a century ago, Edwin Hubble, an American Astronomer, made the surprising observation that galaxies are moving apart, and that galaxies farther away from us are moving faster than nearby galaxies. With this, he showed us that the Universe is expanding. Towards the end of the last century, scientists discovered something even more surprising. When they more carefully studied how fast nearer and farther galaxies are moving away from us, they found that the Universe is not just expanding, but that the rate of expansion is increasing.