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India’s foreign ministry said on Friday that conditions along its frontier with China are disrupted from time to time when Chinese forces depart from established patrolling patterns, after the head of the border police said confrontations with Chinese troops were continuing in Arunachal Pradesh File Photo Via: @ITBP_official on X Asked about those remarks, the ministry spokesman, Randhir Jaiswal, referred questions to the defence ministry but said the situation in the border areas was periodically disturbed when Chinese forces diverged from agreed patterns. Both countries continued to use diplomatic and military channels to settle outstanding issues and avoid misunderstanding along the Line of Actual Control, he said, and had agreed to discuss ways to improve a shared understanding of the line in some areas. Earlier, Shatrujeet Kapur, director general of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, told personnel at a base in Alwar, Rajasthan, on Thursday that face-offs had occurred at severa...

India’s defence minister released a new Land Warfare Doctrine for the army on Friday and told its senior commanders to plan on a horizon of twenty to thirty years while remaining ready for immediate threats Image Source: @rajnathsingh on X Rajnath Singh, addressing the Army Commanders’ Conference in the capital, said the doctrine provided an overarching framework for preparing the force for the changing character of warfare and for future conflicts. He told commanders to watch geopolitical and regional developments closely and to keep strategy flexible enough to adjust as circumstances changed. He returned to Operation Sindoor, the military action India conducted against targets in Pakistan in May 2025, saying its success rested on innovative thinking, greater synergy and coordination, supported by advanced weaponry. The operation had made clear that India would not hesitate to act to protect its interests, he said. Singh praised the army’s restructuring and its use of drones, a...

A magnitude 7.0 earthquake killed at least 16 people and injured 65 in Tibet, bringing down hundreds of houses in a remote stretch of high plateau and forcing more than 12,000 people out of their homes Image Source: @PulseOrbit on X The quake struck Baqen county, in Nagqu city in the Tibet Autonomous Region, at 10.33pm local time (1433 GMT), with its epicentre in a mountainous area about 190 kilometres from Nagqu and 390 kilometres northeast of Lhasa. The US Geological Survey put its depth at 18 kilometres. Eleven of the injured were in a serious condition. At least 339 homes and 20 livestock sheds collapsed, the Nagqu city media office said, with the full extent of the damage still being assessed. Rockfalls forced the closure of a section of National Highway 317 to all but emergency traffic. Power and telephone services failed in the county town. More than 1,600 people were deployed on rescue work, along with over 300 police officers sent to the epicentre to check damaged build...

The Speaker of India’s lower house said on Thursday that any fresh motion seeking the removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar would be examined under parliamentary rules, as the opposition prepares a third attempt to unseat him Image Via: @ombirlakota on X “If any fresh notice comes, we will see and examine it accordingly under rules and procedures,” Om Birla told reporters while responding to questions at a press conference. He said the process resembled that for removing a Supreme Court judge, and that in a democracy everyone had the right to express their views. Opposition parties have demanded Kumar’s resignation over the Election Commission’s nationwide revision of electoral rolls, in protests that have run through October. The campaign followed a report in The Indian Express that the two other election commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had recorded objections at least fourteen times in ten months to decisions and orders connected with the rev...

India and Poland set a target of doubling bilateral trade by 2030 and agreed to establish a defence industry dialogue, as Prime Minister Donald Tusk ended three days of talks in India accompanied by around a hundred Polish chief executives Image Source: PIB The two sides also agreed to open a dialogue on counter-terrorism, and India welcomed Poland’s decision to join the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure, an Indian-led body on infrastructure and climate risk. The relationship was raised to a strategic partnership during Modi’s visit to Warsaw in August 2024, when the two adopted an action plan running to 2028. Foreign ministers reviewed it in Warsaw in September. Much of the economic discussion turned on the free trade agreement concluded between India and the European Union, which has not yet been signed or ratified. Both leaders called for that to happen early and for the agreement to be implemented on time. Modi said it would open Polish markets to Indian machinery, ...

On 24 August 2006, at the close of the International Astronomical Union’s General Assembly in Prague, 424 astronomers raised yellow cards to decide what a planet is. When student volunteers had counted the votes, the solar system had eight planets. Pluto, a planet since its discovery in 1930, was not one of them. Image Via: @SETIInstitute on X One of the most common questions about space, how many planets are in the solar system, was settled by a show of hands. Two decades later the definition still stands in the union’s rules and in textbooks worldwide. Some scientists reject it, and a telescope in Chile is now searching for a world that could make the count nine again. What Forced The Vote The trouble began at Palomar Observatory in California. On 21 October 2003, a telescope there photographed a faint point of light moving slowly far beyond Neptune. The astronomers Mike Brown, Chad Trujillo and David Rabinowitz noticed it only in January 2005, on a second pass through the imag...

On 10 April 2019, astronomers released the first image of a black hole: a bright ring of glowing gas around a dark centre in the galaxy M87, about 55 million light years from Earth. A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape once it crosses a boundary called the event horizon. Image Source: @LuisADomDaly on X For most of the 20th century, black holes existed only as solutions to equations. In less than a decade they became objects that scientists can weigh, hear and photograph, and the discoveries behind them won the Nobel Prize in Physics in both 2017 and 2020. How A Black Hole Forms The idea began months after Albert Einstein published his general theory of relativity in 1915. In 1916, the German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild found a solution to Einstein’s equations describing a mass so compact that space around it closes in on itself. For decades many physicists, Einstein among them, doubted that nature would ever pro...

In 1964, two radio astronomers at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, could not get rid of a faint hiss in their horn antenna, even after evicting the pigeons nesting inside it and cleaning out their droppings. The hiss turned out to be the afterglow of the Big Bang, and it is the main reason scientists can say the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. Representational Image Via: @Nereide on X Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson had stumbled on the oldest light in existence. Six decades of measurement since have turned that discovery into one of the most precise numbers in science. Now a stubborn disagreement over how fast the universe is expanding is testing the theory that produces it. An Expanding Universe The story starts with the discovery that the universe is growing. In 1927, the Belgian priest and physicist Georges Lemaître published calculations showing that galaxies should be moving away from one another, faster the farther apart they are. Two years late...

The sunlight falling on Earth left the Sun about eight minutes and 20 seconds earlier. The oldest light astronomers can detect has been travelling for about 13.8 billion years, and the matter that released it now lies about 46 billion light years away. That makes the observable universe about 93 billion light years across. Representational Image Via: @AMAZlNGNATURE on X No one knows how big the whole universe is beyond that. Astronomers have measured the part they can see with growing precision, using a chain of methods built over a century. Past its edge, the universe may go on for ever. What A Light Year Measures A light year is a distance, not a time: how far light travels in a vacuum in one year. At almost 300,000 km a second, that comes to about 9.46 trillion km. Kilometres stop being useful almost as soon as you leave the solar system. The nearest star after the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is about 4.24 light years away, close to 40 trillion km. Its light reaching Earth tonight...