The country’s political economy looksall set for a rightward shift The far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro could not have got closer to Brazil’s presidency in a more convincing manner in the first round of elections, that took place on Sunday. The former army captain who belongs to the Social Liberal Party …

An NRC for Tripura will riskcreating new fault lines in the State Just three months after the final draft of the National Register of Citizens for Assam was released, the Supreme Court has tagged a petition seeking a similar process for Tripura. The petition now tagged to the Assam case …

The government’s measures for arresting the rupee’s slide have failed. The approach needs a rethink In the unenviable sequence of conceptually-flawed economic policies – to which also belong demonetisation and the Goods and Services Tax’s (GST) rate structure and collection system — the latest is the government’s response to the …

Two recent developments draw our attention to the state of India’s universities. The first is the release of the annual ranking of the world’s universities by the Times Higher Education ( THE ). The other is an announcement by the Prime Minister, as reported in the press, which has an …

In June, farmers in water-starved Kolar were overjoyed when the newly inaugurated KC Valley Project began supplying treated sewage water from Bengaluru . But things went horribly wrong in July when the pipeline began to spew out raw sewage, contaminating the land, the lakes and the groundwater. Mohit M. Rao …

Record ‘radio bursts’ detected from space Australian researchers on Thursday said they have detected a record number of radio waves from space, including the closest and fastest one that may help understand the matter between galaxies. They said they found 20 fast radio bursts in a year, almost doubling the …

Egyptian blue was used for cooling walls A colour developed by Egyptians thousands of years ago can boost energy efficiency by cooling rooftops and walls, and could also enable solar generation of electricity via windows, scientists say. Egyptian blue, derived from calcium copper silicate, was routinely used on ancient depictions …

Stephen Hawking’s final scientific paper — which was completed days before the British physicist’s death — has been written and posted online by his colleagues at Cambridge and Harvard universities. The paper named Black Hole Entropy and Soft Hair, tackles with what happens to information when it falls into a …

Further studies may lead to fertility treatments in same-sex couples A team of researchers has produced viable offspring from same-sex pairs of mice, using a novel technology that involves stem cells altered to remove certain genes. While the applications of the research are largely theoretical for now, they could include …

Research team is comparing the medical histories of 10,000 former football players with non players Does heading a football give you dementia? That’s the question neuropathologist Willie Stewart is attempting to answer by comparing the health of thousands of former footballers with non-players. Football authorities have been accused of dragging …