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Nasa’s Dawn spacecraft image of the limb of dwarf planet Ceres shows a section of the northern hemisphere. Photo: Courtesy Nasa/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA/Reuters San Francisco: The dwarf planet Ceres, an enigmatic rocky body inhabiting the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, is rich with ice just beneath its dark surface, scientists said in research that may shed light on the early history of the solar system. The discovery, reported in a pair of studies published in the journals Science and Nature Astronomy, could bolster fledgling commercial endeavours to mine asteroids for water and other resources for robotic and eventual human expeditions beyond the moon. Nasa’s Dawn spacecraft has been orbiting Ceres, the largest of thousands of rocky bodies located in the main asteroid belt, since March 2015 following 14-month study of Vesta, the second-largest object in the asteroid belt. The studies show that Ceres is about 10% water, now frozen into ice, according to physi...

San Francisco: The dwarf planet Ceres, an enigmatic rocky body inhabiting the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, is rich with ice just beneath its dark surface, scientists said in research that may shed light on the early history of the solar system. The discovery, reported in a pair of studies published in the journals Science and Nature Astronomy, could bolster fledgling commercial endeavours to mine asteroids for water and other resources for robotic and eventual human expeditions beyond the moon. Nasa’s Dawn spacecraft has been orbiting Ceres, the largest of thousands of rocky bodies located in the main asteroid belt, since March 2015 following 14-month study of Vesta, the second-largest object in the asteroid belt. The studies show that Ceres is about 10% water, now frozen into ice, according to physicist Thomas Prettyman of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, one of the researchers. Examining the makeup of solar system objects like Ceres provides insigh...

The withdrawal of Rs500 and Rs1,000 notes on 8 November has changed the composition of money supply in the economy. A large part of what was currency in circulation is now coming to banks as deposits. The sudden inflow of deposits has given rise to speculation about how these will be utilized by the banks. There are reports that banks will increase lending. Some have suggested that banks’ non-performing asset (NPA) problems will get alleviated. This is not correct. Our analysis suggests that: (1) banks are not in a position to significantly increase lending, (2) their net interest income (NII) may fall over the next few quarters, worsening their capital position, and (3) their NPA situation may get worse, further adding to their capital woes.  Close to 86% of the currency in circulation, amounting to roughly Rs14 trillion, was withdrawn overnight. By 13 November, Rs5.1 trillion   out of this had been deposited in the banking system and Rs0.3 trillion had been exchanged ove...

     Within weeks of our moving to London from Singapore, I received a note from my son’s school, saying that the students were to dress up as a character important in British history and tell the story of the character in their class, as part of History Week. We were still settling in a new country, and trying to organise the dress of a long-dead king or an author with whom my then-six-going-to-be-seven-year-old son could connect seemed less of a priority than figuring out how to register ourselves with the local doctor’s clinic. So we thought of sending him dressed in  churidar-kurta  with a red rose, and said he should tell the story of Jawaharlal Nehru, about which he knew what a six-year-old boy would. The following day the teacher patiently told me that I had probably misread the note: the character had to be important in British history, not world history. I smiled and said, actually, Nehru was pretty important for British history—not only because...