The Government of India “will take over” the grounds of the Birla House, where Gandhiji met his martyrdom, improve it and maintain it with due care, dignity and solemnity, Mr. Jagannath Rao, Minister of Works and Housing announced in the Lok Sabha to-day [December 17, New Delhi]. Mr. Rao did …

Memories of tracking cricket in the Australian summer inevitably have the alarm clock’s shrill ring during nippy December dawns. It was an annual ritual: wake up groggy, gulp your morning brew and catch live action beamed in from Channel Nine.The telecast quality was top-drawer; the commentary was a mix of …

In a crucial development that exposes the flaws in health policy-making in the country, the Delhi High Court quashed a government ban on the retail sale and private manufacture of oxytocin. Notified by the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in April, the ban referred to a 2016 Himachal …

Five years ago, there wasn’t even a sliver of hope that any influential Congress leader would be brought to justice for the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984. A trial court had acquitted former MP Sajjan Kumar, rejecting the testimony of witnesses who said he was seen instigating riots in the Raj …

A good auditor is a good listener” said President Ram Nath Kovind during his recent speech at the 29th Accountants General Conference. “You will not only see the accounts in their books, but also listen to their accounts,” he said. It is only when this conception is accepted that audits …

Ever since voters have been provided the ‘None of the Above’ (NOTA) option if they do not want to vote for any of the candidates in the fray, political parties now cite many voters having chosen NOTA as a reason for losing an election. This may be true in very …

Centrism, as an essential characteristic of Indian politics, signifies the institutional incentive that political parties have to adopt a set of policies aimed at harmonising societal and cultural contradictions rather than accentuating them. Some of its essential elements are: centrality of an accommodative approach, appeal to minorities, welfarism and a …

“Until you start focussing on what needs to be done, rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope,” said Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old activist from Sweden who shook the United Nations gathering at Katowice, Poland, with her plain speaking. But what she said should not happen is exactly …

Indian spinner Harbhajan Singh “broke down crying” when he finally made up with Andrew Symonds after the infamous “monkeygate” scandal had sent the Australian all-rounder into a downward spiral, he revealed on Sunday.A decade on from the ugly incident in the 2008 Sydney Test, where Harbhajan Singh was accused of …

Toys have ceased to be the simple contraptions, or elementary games of yore that stimulated the imagination in children. They have now morphed into flashy, digital gadgets. But are these toys doing more harm than good to childrenIn a report published online this month in the peer-reviewed Pediatrics , experts …

Chances are, cutting down screen time, especially on your phone, is somewhere on the top of your list of new year resolutions for 2019. And there are any number of productivity hacks and tips for intentional living to guide you in segregating screen-free chunks of time on your daily schedule. …

Hardly a week passes nowadays without a new corporate governance-related issue roiling the markets. The ripples created by IL&FS and ICICI Bank had hardly begun to die down when news broke of Jet Airways’ principal lender, State Bank of India, ordering a forensic audit of the troubled airline’s accounts for …

When we were kids, many of us had the idea that being in charge of something, a team, a class, a project meant that you had to shout a lot. Speaking loudly and constantly and then going up a gear into a full-throated roar was, it seemed to us, the …

Aerobic activities such as jogging and interval training can make our cells biologically younger, according to a noteworthy new experiment. Weight training may not have the same effect, the study found, raising interesting questions about how various types of exercise affect us at a microscopic level and whether the differences …

Graphene, a form of carbon and a super-strong, ultra-light material discovered in 2004, enables flexible electronic components, enhances solar cell capacity, and promises to revolutionise batteries. Now scientists have added one more use to this list.They have found a potential new application of this material for detecting Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis …

By sequencing the exome (the part of the genome composed of exons that gets translated into proteins) of 32 people from eight families who suffer from mental illness such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and psychosis, Bengaluru-based researchers have identified 42 rare mutations in the genes implicated in very severe mental …

Besides treatment, there is an urgent need for monitoring tuberculosis treatment to achieve better results. Researchers from the National Jalma Institute for Leprosy and Other Mycobacterial Diseases, have succeeded in identifying a couple of cell-based markers to study the response of TB patients to treatment.Currently, studying the sputum of the …

Researchers from Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Pune propose a change in the way epidemiologists estimate the growth and adaptation rate of bacteria. The paper, to be published in Evolutionary Biology, poses this challenge to both theoreticians and experimentalists who are studying the growth of asexual populations …

Researchers from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi and IIT Kanpur have used a different approach to mimic the development biology pathway by which adult load-bearing, long bones are formed. The bone construct was fabricated by combining tissue engineering and 3D bioprinting. The study also helped in understanding the detailed …

A federal judge in Texas has ruled that the U.S. health-care law known as Obamacare is unconstitutional — a ruling that Opposition Democrats quickly vowed to appeal.aU.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor’s ruling came on the eve of the Saturday deadline to sign up for 2019 coverage in the federal health-care …