I woke up on the morning of Aug. 12 and looked out of the window to something I hadn’t dared hope for: blue sky.
After days of scrutinizing weather models that seemed determined to test the nerves of everyone aboard the HX Expeditions ship MS Spitsbergen, somehow, against the odds, the clouds had cleared. Even then, I didn’t trust it (especially after my 2024 eclipse experience). We…
Astronomers discover a giant, rocky 'mega-Earth' 23 times more massive than our planet
August 20, 2026
Astronomers have discovered an unusually massive, dense exoplanet that challenges conventional ideas about how rocky planets form.
Called GJ 523b, the exoplanet is about 2.5 times wider than Earth but packs roughly 23 times our planet’s mass into that relatively…
Google Pixel 11 First Impression: Evolution Over Revolution
August 20, 2026
Google’s new Pixel 11 launched worldwide earlier last week and in India, it starts at Rs 89,999. That’s a price hike of Rs 10,000 compared to the Pixel 10 but how is Google trying to justify this bump in price? We’ll talk about that in our Google Pixel 11…
Notification LEDs were once a common smartphone feature back in the day, and they usually sat above or below the display and blinked in different colours when you received a message, missed a call or needed to charge the phone. I remember having the Galaxy S4 and phones from Lenovo which had this feature and they actually made life easier. As bezels became thinner and Always-On Displays became…
iQOO Neo 11 Ultra and iQOO Z11S have been announced in China as the brand’s latest premium and mid-range phones, respectively. Both the devices come with MediaTek processors under the hood and they also have up to 512GB of storage. The devices also come with huge…
Nuclear power startups have been pitching themselves as the antidote to what ails AI data centers: power that’s always available. Bill Gates-founded TerraPower is one of the latest to throw its hat into that ring, with Bloomberg reporting that the startup plans to…
A biotech startup called Vivodyne says the AI drug-discovery industry has a data problem, and that it has built a machine to fix it.
HIVE, modular robotic labs built by the company, can grow 20 kinds of human tissue, then autonomously dose and monitor them, generating the kind of causal biological data that today’s AI models are missing – data that today mostly comes from animal…
Relativity Networks raises $22 million to bring a faster kind of fiber to data centers
August 20, 2026
Data center developers are expected to spend as much as $4 trillion by the end of the decade – and they’re already heavily constrained by both political and power-grid considerations in where they can build. But while most treat the speed of fiber as a given, one…
World Photography Day: How NASA imagery has shaped our understanding of the Earth, the universe and existence
August 20, 2026
Since its inception in 1958, NASA has arguably played the most important role in furthering our knowledge of Earth, the universe and natural phenomena.
Through its mesmerizing photos captured by spacecraft imaging devices and pioneering astronauts with handheld cameras, the…
Almost 4,000 entries whittled down to just 4 – the Winston Taylor Photo Portrait Prize 2026 shortlist has been announced
August 20, 2026
Each year, the National Portrait Gallery in London, England, runs its Winston Taylor Photo Portrait Prize competition (formerly Taylor Wessing), attracting submissions from both professionals and amateurs across the world. At this year’s edition, 3,977 portraits were submitted.
The event organizers have now whittled these down to just four finalist images, which will vie for the top prize of…
