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Sights from the Akkulam Glass bridge | Photo Credit: Nainu Oommen As I stood on the glass bridge at the Akkulam Tourist Village in Thiruvananthapuram, it felt like I was suspended in air with the Akkulam lake flowing 54 feet below me. While the structure boasts three 12-millimetre-thick laminated glass panels, an eerie feeling slowly crept within me as I listened to the gushing winds combined with the babbling reservoir.It is quite a climb to the glass bridge, scaling a spiral stairwell and passing through almost all the attractions inside the Village — from play areas to 12 D theatres.…

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT Bombay), have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model that enables machines to interpret satellite and drone images using everyday language prompts, potentially transforming applications in disaster response, surveillance, urban planning, and agriculture. The model, called Adaptive Modality-guided Visual Grounding (AMVG), has been designed by a team led by Professor Biplab Banerjee from IIT Bombay’s Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering. Spotting a cat in a living room might be easy for artificial intelligence, but decoding complex, high-resolution satellite imagery based on natural language instructions has long been a challenge, said Shabnam Choudhury, lead…

India should never allow Donald Trump the illusion that he is in the driver’s seatOn February 2, 2026, US President Donald Trump suddenly announced that, after nearly a year of conflict with India, he had struck a deal with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “Our amazing relationship with India will be even stronger going forward. Prime Minister Modi and I are two people that GET THINGS DONE,” he wrote.Trump announced that he would lower tariffs on India from 25 to 18 per cent and bragged that not only did Modi reduce tariffs and other barriers against US products to zero, but…

In 1974, Antony Hewish won the physics Nobel Prize for discovering pulsars. His graduate student, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, had actually spotted the first one in the data; she’d also built parts of the telescope herself, analysed the charts, noticed the anomaly, and helped confirm that it was real. But she didn’t win the prize. At the time, the Nobel committees argued that Hewish had designed the telescope and directed the research programme. The fact that Bell Burnell’s eyes and judgment were the ones that caught the signal didn’t register as the decisive contribution. In fact, in the committee’s apparent view,…

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee at the Teachers’ Day programme in Kolkata, highlighted the contribution of educators, on September 5, 2025. | Photo Credit: Debasish Bhaduri KolkataChief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday said the ongoing teacher recruitment crisis would be resolved soon, adding that ‘tainted’ teachers could be accommodated in alternative roles. Her remarks, made ahead of Teacher’s Day, have drawn sharp criticism from groups representing ‘untainted’ teachers. Speaking at the Shiksha Ratna programme at the Dhono Dhanyo auditorium in Kolkata, Ms. Banerjee said, “After working for so many years, many of them have been termed ‘tainted and ineligible’. I…

Watch: PM Modi holds bilateral meeting with Sri Lankan President Source link

Image for the purpose of representation only. | Photo Credit: Aijaz Rahi GUWAHATIThe Bodoland Territorial Region (BTR) in Assam has become the first tribal council under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution to fully digitise its land records.Officials said the digitisation of more than 15 lakh land documents, including texts and maps, across the 8,970 sq. km BTR was completed a few weeks ago, ending decades of manual record-keeping. There are 10 tribal councils under the Sixth Schedule in the north-east – three each in Assam, Meghalaya, and Mizoram, and one in Tripura. Two of Assam’s councils, in Karbi Anglong-West Karbi…

Vishnuvardhan, whose 75th birth anniversary falls on Thursday, is celebrated as the “Sahasa Simha” (brave lion) of the Kannada film industry by his fans. The moniker, however, does not quite capture the wide range of roles he played.His last few movies, before his death in 2009, prove that his talent was not on the wane. However, directors with a lack of imagination wrote for him the typical kind-hearted, sacrificial-saviour type of roles.Veteran stars such as Mammootty and Mohanlal in Malayalam, Rajinikanth in Tamil, and Amitabh Bachchan in Hindi have dared to experiment in the fag end of their careers. Likewise,…

Idols of Goddess Durga being immersed in the Yamuna river during the Durga Puja festival, at Dussehra Ghat behind the Taj Mahal, in Agra, on October 2, 2025 | Photo Credit: PTI AGRA (UTTAR PRADESH) Two persons drowned and six others went missing during an idol immersion in the Utangan river in Agra district, officials said on Friday (October 3 2025)The incident occurred in Khairagarh area on Thursday (October 2, 2025) when nine people slipped into deep water during the immersion. While locals managed to rescue one person, the bodies of Gagan (26) and Ompal (32) were later recovered, they…

Bhubaneswar: A view of a pandal during the ‘Durga Puja’ festival, in Bhubaneswar. File | Photo Credit: PTI 215 heritage Durga Pujas will receive ₹ 1.10 lakh each, the ones in the second and third categories will get ₹ 75,000 and ₹ 50,000, said the Culture Minister The BJP government in Odisha announced that it will provide financial assistance to Durga Puja committees up to ₹ 1.10 lakh each.Culture Minister Suryabanshi Suraj said on Saturday (October 4, 2025) that the decision was taken to promote cultural heritage and support traditional festivities.The committees have been divided into three categories – heritage…