Times

There are millions of stars visible in a clear night sky. From Earth, they appear like tiny dots sparkling for no explained reason. But there's one star at the centre of our existence, which burns itself to support life. It's the Sun, around which several planets, including the Earth, revolves. Now, imagine a star that is 200,000 times brighter and 32 times more massive than our Sun. NASA has recently shared an image that showed what a world around this star would look like. The image featured a cosmic landscape that…

Last week, the employees of Cameo, a startup that sells personalized videos from celebrities, gathered for an all-hands meeting. The news was not good: Nearly a quarter of the staff was being laid off.“Today has been a brutal day at the office,” Steve Galanis, the company’s CEO, wrote on Twitter just after the announcement. “I made the painful decision to let go of 87 beloved members of the Cameo Fameo.” In the replies, people were pissed. Cameo had gone on a massive hiring spree in 2021, and many of the layoffs affected…

When Chris Pratt Spoke About Eating Customers’ Leftovers During His Pre-Fame Days Saying “I Had No Money” – Watch ( Photo Credit – Chris Pratt / Wikimedia ) Chris Pratt is a talented star who first won our hearts as Andy Dwyer in the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation. Since then, the actor has played the lead roles in money-minting franchises including Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy and Jurassic World. But do you know about his journey in reaching where he is today? In a 2016 appearance on a talk show,…

An underwater volcano erupted in January near the Pacific nation of Tonga and sent massive pressure waves racing through Earth's atmosphere, where they lapped the planet several times.  The last volcano to generate such large ripples in the atmosphere was Krakatau in 1883, during one of the most destructive volcanic eruptions in recorded history, a new study shows."This atmospheric wave event was unprecedented in the modern geophysical record," said first author Robin Matoza, an associate professor in the Department of…

Federal Reserve Bank of New York leader John Williams said Monday that bond market volatility doesn’t look problematic to him, in comments that reiterated his view that the central bank will need to forcefully tighten monetary policy to contain inflation. The churn seen in government bonds over recent weeks is “more or less in line with” what one would expect to see given general uncertainty over the outlook and the shift in Fed policy, Mr. Williams said. “I’m not seeing signs of market dysfunction in…

Along with the Pixel phones, watches and earbuds at Google’s annual showcase of software and devices last week came a pair of nifty-looking translation glasses. Put them on and real-time “subtitles" appear on the lenses as you watch a person speaking in a different language. Very cool. But the glasses aren’t commercially available. It’s also unlikely they will make anywhere near as much money as advertising does for Google’s parent, Alphabet Inc. Of the company’s $68 billion in total revenue from the quarter…

Illustration of the gold-graphene structure in which electron waves from real and virtual charges are targeted with two ultrafast laser pulses. The combined effect can be used in an ultrafast logic gate. Credit: Michael Osadciw, University of RochesterSimulating complex scientific models on the computer or processing large volumes of data such as editing video material takes considerable computing power and time. Researchers from the Chair of Laser Physics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and a…

The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary 432pp, ₹499; Navayana (Gita Ramaswamy’s memoir is a story of struggles and victories) It was the 1980s. In Ibrahimpatnam, Telangana, south India, landless Dalits were being exploited by the wealthy upper castes, who, like movie villains, brandished whips and guns. Enter 30-year-old Gita Ramaswamy. In her teens, she had escaped her brahminical family, who had tried to “cure” her of Naxalism with shock treatment and sedation. She was disillusioned by the Emergency, but held on to…

It is 16 August 2020 and Alan Bennett and his partner are on their customary evening walk. Given that 86-year-old Bennett is hobbled with rheumatoid arthritis, this is hardly an ambitious excursion – literally three minutes “round the block” of their north London street. Suddenly the windows fly open and neighbours start banging pots and clapping. Since he needs to lean heavily on his walking stick, Bennett is unable to join in, but he compensates by standing in the street and nodding enthusiastically. Until, that is, the…

In the archives and manuscripts section of the British Library in London, the item identified as ADD MS 89154/11/21 is a small notebook. This notebook is 4 x 6 inches with a black and white print on the cover that says “The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood.” The first entry in the notebook begins: “Nov 1st. And so, suddenly, I’m off to India. The last time I had gone it was because of another death — that of Sanjay.” No Photography Allowed: A drawing by Amitava Kumar of Shiva Naipaul’s notebook stored in the British Library.…