Water is essential in biochemical processes needed for the survival of living organisms. Humans can survive without water for about 2-7 days. However, there exists an animal so resilient that it can withstand water scarcity for decades! Tardigrades, also called water bears, are small aquatic animals that are about 1.2 mm long with a head and four pairs of clawed legs, looking like cute little gummy bears.

Standing a metre tall and weighing up to a whopping 18 kilograms, the Great Indian bustards (GIB) are one of the heaviest flying birds on Earth. Yet, they are unable to ‘throw their weight around’ in this world dominated by us. Their numbers have drastically declined by nearly 90% in the last 50 years, and the future of these charismatic birds look very bleak. They are now in a tight race against time for their survival, and if things don’t change fast, they could be the first species to go extinct in independent India.

An international team of researchers investigate the prevalence of water reallocations, from rural areas to cities, throughout the world to understand its drivers, conflicts and policy implications.

A new study recommends repeating blood pressure measurements to diagnose hypertension accurately.

Researchers at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru, University of Leeds, UK, and Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, traced some of the misinformed decisions that were made in the past about trying to grow forests in the shola-grassland landscapes of the Nilgiris.

Picture this- you’re being grilled at an extremely important interview. You’re a bag of nerves but you’re holding it together and actually doing pretty well when suddenly you feel that dreaded feeling inside you. It’s something you cannot suppress but you try and exercise damage control by ensuring you keep your mouth closed. As a result, your nostrils flare, your lips appear distorted, and your watery eyes are a dead giveaway. Your yawn gets the better of you.

An international team of researchers focus on a representative sample of languages to reconstruct the Dravidian language family tree by using first-hand data, to understand how old the languages are and how they are related.

Researchers at the Jawaharlal Nehru Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute, Thiruvananthapuram, explore how insectivorous plants attract insects.

Researchers from the Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, report that the diversity of earthworms enriches the carbon content of the soil.

All of us have dutifully parroted this one sentence back in high school - ‘Mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell’. Indeed, one couldn’t sum up mitochondria more succinctly, as that is their precise function in a cell. These tiny, double-layered organelles live happily inside a cell’s cytoplasm, producing energy as and when required. This energy, made in the form of a chemical compound called ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate), keeps the cell up and running.