Research

The Sun’s corona is a strange and extreme region. Although it lies above the visible surface, it reaches very high temperatures and remains one of the most difficult parts of the Sun to understand. NASA also notes that the corona is extremely hot but very dim because it is far less dense than the Sun’s surface. This basic contradiction — a hotter outer atmosphere above a comparatively cooler surface — is known as the coronal heating problem, and scientists have studied it for decades.

The discovery is important because blue straggler stars are already among the more puzzling objects in star clusters. In a cluster where stars are expected to be of broadly similar age, blue stragglers appear brighter and bluer than the main-sequence turn-off point, making them look unusually young or rejuvenated compared to their stellar neighbours. This has long raised questions about whether they are formed through mass transfer, mergers, stellar interactions or more complex multi-star evolution.

The breakthrough is important because future electronics will increasingly depend on lightweight, flexible and low-power materials that can function without heavy batteries. From health-monitoring wearables to environmental sensors and smart photodetectors, next-generation devices need materials that can respond to tiny changes in heat, light and motion while consuming very little energy.

Using Chandrayaan-2’s Dual Frequency Synthetic Aperture Radar, scientists examined nine doubly shadowed craters located within the larger Faustini, Haworth and Shoemaker craters near the lunar south pole. The radar instrument used full-polarimetric observations in L-band and S-band, allowing researchers to look for subsurface signatures that may indicate ice mixed within lunar soil.

The agreement was signed at SAMEER headquarters on the IIT Bombay campus in Mumbai by Dr. A. K. Anil Kumar, Director of ISTRAC/ISRO, and Dr. P. Hanumantha Rao, Director General of SAMEER. SAMEER is an autonomous research and development laboratory under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, while ISTRAC is the ISRO centre responsible for telemetry reception, tracking and commanding for satellite, launch vehicle and deep-space missions.

HAB-1, short for Habitat-1, is described as a compact inflatable habitat equipped with essential systems such as a kitchen, sanitation facilities and a hydroponics unit. The purpose of such a habitat is to create a self-contained living environment where crew members can operate under restrictions similar to those expected in future Moon or Mars missions. It is not just about surviving inside a pod; it is about learning how humans behave, work, communicate and remain healthy when separated from normal social, environmental and logistical support.

For India, the research is especially important because the Indian wolf is not simply a local version of the common grey wolf seen in Europe or North America. It represents an old evolutionary branch with its own genetic history. The same is true of the Tibetan wolf, which survives in high-altitude landscapes linked to the Tibetan plateau and Himalayan regions. These wolves are living records of how the species adapted to different Asian landscapes over deep time.

The study deals with one of the deepest limitations in quantum physics: not every property of a quantum system can be measured together with perfect precision. This idea is rooted in Bohr’s complementarity principle and appears in familiar quantum examples such as the trade-off between path information and interference in the double-slit experiment, or the difficulty of jointly measuring non-commuting observables like different spin components of a particle.