News on Science, Technology and Research in India
The facility at Chandrapur in Assam is being developed as part of ISRO’s dedicated Space Situational Awareness infrastructure. Once operational, the radar will strengthen India’s indigenous capability to monitor satellites, spent rocket stages, orbital debris and other objects travelling around Earth.
Union Minister of State for Earth Sciences Dr. Jitendra Singh virtually inaugurated the new radar on September 17 in the presence of Odisha Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi. The installation is expected to improve monitoring of thunderstorms, heavy rainfall, lightning and other significant weather systems across western Odisha and neighbouring regions.
The research team comprises Sudipta Paul, Priyank Sinha, Amul Jain and Dr Sanjib Banerjee of IIT Bhilai. Their study has been published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Small Methods.
RoboSub 2026 was held from July 11 to 16 at the Woollett Aquatics Center in Irvine, California. The annual competition challenges university teams to design autonomous underwater robots capable of completing tasks that reflect problems encountered in real marine environments, including navigation, mapping, object detection, manipulation and pipeline tracking.
The research uses a newly isolated bacterium, Brevundimonas sp. AJZ05, to break down Direct Blue-6, a synthetic azo dye that is difficult to remove through many conventional wastewater-treatment methods.
The research was published in the journal Quaternary Research by Cambridge University Press in April 2026. The research team comprised Trina Bose, Mayank Shekhar, Akhilesh K. Yadava, Avanish Mishra, Arya Pandey and Anurag Kumar, all affiliated with the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences.
The larger of the newly highlighted science-infrastructure initiatives is the proposed Astro Park at Krishnanagar in Nadia district. According to the state government’s official Science & Technology Congress material, the facility will cover around two acres and involve an estimated outlay of ₹12 crore.
The research was carried out by Binu Varghese and Yogendra Kumar from IISc’s Centre for Condensed Matter Theory in the Department of Physics, along with Shubhashis Sengupta of Accenture Labs and Professor Prabal K Maiti of IISc. The study was published in the journal Small on August 17, 2026, and subsequently highlighted by IISc on September 10.
The research was led by the Quantum Information and Computing laboratory at the Raman Research Institute, an autonomous institution of the Department of Science and Technology, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Calgary and Louisiana State University.
Researchers at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bengaluru (an autonomous institution under the Department of Science & Technology, Govt. of India) and other research team members have found an unusual wave-like thermal transport regime in a newly studied copper chalcogenide material, TlCu5Se3 that can lead to high-performance thermoelectric conversion.
