Subterranean forest of fungi

by Hansraj Agrawal | Jun 14, 2026 | Science

Imagine a forest so vast that if you could pull it out of the ground and stretch it into a single line, it would measure one-tenth the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy. Such a forest exists beneath our ground. Only, this forest is made not of trees but of fungi.

Scientists have just produced the first global map of an immense underground fungal network that quietly supports most of the world’s land plants.

The fungi form microscopic thread-like structures that weave through the soil, linking themselves to plant roots in a remarkable partnership; the fungi supply vital nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, while the plants pay them back with carbon-rich sugars produced through photosynthesis.

The scale of this hidden system is staggering. Researchers found that nearly 40 per cent of the world’s fungal biomass is packed into just the top 15 cm of soil in certain grasslands, especially high-altitude and seasonally flooded ecosystems such as Florida’s Everglades. These underground fungal highways help lock away enormous amounts of carbon, making undisturbed grasslands some of the planet’s most dependable carbon sinks.

The fungi are voracious carbon collectors. One estimate suggests they absorb around 4.3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent every year — roughly 11 per cent of humanity’s fossil fuel emissions in 2021.

But there is a worrying twist. The new map shows that many farming practices are tearing apart this hidden world. Topsoil in croplands contains, on average, only about half the fungal density found in healthier ecosystems — yet another instance of humankind destroying itself.

Published on June 15, 2026

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Using sound waves to bypass charge-based circuits

by Hansraj Agrawal | Jun 14, 2026 | Science

Sound waves induce magnon spin

Researchers have discovered a new way to create and control magnetic information signals using sound waves. The technique could help electronic devices use less power and generate less heat.

Today’s electronics work by moving electric charges through circuits. This movement wastes energy as heat. As devices become smaller and faster, reducing this energy loss becomes increasingly important.

Instead of moving electric charge, the researchers use magnons — tiny waves of magnetic activity inside a material — to carry information. Magnons can travel with much lower energy loss than electrons.

The team from the Institute of Nano Science and Technology (INST), Mohali, showed theoretically that surface acoustic waves (sound waves that travel along the surface of a material) can create tiny distortions in a magnetic material. These distortions act like forces that push magnons and generate a spin current. This offers a new way to control magnetic information without relying on conventional electric currents.

The researchers built a theoretical model of an ultrathin magnetic material placed on a piezoelectric substrate. They found that sound waves travelling through the substrate can control the movement of magnons in the magnetic layer.

This work suggests that sound waves could become a practical tool for controlling magnetic signals in future low-power electronics, offering an alternative to conventional charge-based circuits.

Memory more suited for AI

Researchers in Germany have developed a new type of computer memory that could help make future electronic devices faster, more energy-efficient and better suited for artificial intelligence applications. The technology, developed jointly by researchers at Fraunhofer IPMS and semiconductor manufacturer GlobalFoundries, is based on ferroelectric random-access memory (FRAM). Unlike conventional memory devices, which may lose stored information when power is switched off, FRAM retains data permanently while consuming very little energy.

The new memory technology uses a material called ferroelectric hafnium oxide. Information is stored by shifting atoms within the material’s crystal structure, creating tiny changes in electrical polarisation. Because this process requires very little power, the memory can operate below one volt and switch states within billionths of a second.

A key achievement of the project was integrating the new memory technology into GlobalFoundries’ existing chip manufacturing process. This means the technology can potentially be produced on an industrial scale rather than remaining confined to the laboratory.

According to the researchers, the memory technology is particularly attractive for battery-powered devices, autonomous sensors and “edge AI” applications, where artificial intelligence runs directly on a device instead of relying on remote data centres. Lower power consumption could allow smart devices to process more information locally while extending battery life.

The researchers say the development combines an ultra low-power chip platform with a memory technology that is both fast and durable. They believe it could help support the next generation of electronics for applications ranging from industrial automation and automotive systems to medical devices and AI-enabled products.

Published on June 15, 2026

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AI aides to decode Indian law

by Hansraj Agrawal | Jun 14, 2026 | Science

NyayaAI, an AI-powered legal assistant developed by researchers at UPES Dehradun, is designed to answer legal questions in plain language. A lawyer researching a case precedent, a law student navigating a constitutional provision or a member of the public who cannot afford legal consultation can type a question on topics ranging from tenancy rights to criminal procedure and contract disputes, and receive a referenced answer.

The system can also summarise lengthy documents, identify relevant precedents and generate preliminary drafts of legal documents.

These developments have been captured in a paper titled ‘NyayaAI: An AI-powered legal assistant using multi-agent architecture and retrieval-augmented generation’, published in arXiv.

Legal help in India remains out of reach for most citizens. Consultation costs are prohibitive for many and legal services are concentrated in cities. The statutes are in English, a language in which the majority of Indians are not fluent. India has about two million registered advocates, most of whom are in urban centres.

Existing platforms such as Manupatra, SCC Online and Indian Kanoon operate on keyword search across digitised legal documents. While paid platforms have been adding AI-assisted search in recent years, none offers the integrated multi-agent task handling or RAG-grounded response generation that NyayaAI provides. AI legal assistants available internationally, including Harvey AI, CoCounsel and LexisNexis Protege, are built around American or British law.

Beyond keywords

NyayaAI addresses a documented failure mode in legal AI: Systems relying on training data alone have generated responses citing cases that do not exist, leading to sanctions against lawyers in US courts.

Rather than generating from memory, the NyayaAI system searches a vector database of Indian legal documents using semantic similarity matching, retrieving provisions and precedents relevant to the query’s meaning rather than its keywords, before generating a response grounded in those documents.

The system uses a multi-agent architecture orchestrated through the Mastra TypeScript framework. A main agent classifies incoming queries by legal domain, covering constitutional, criminal, civil, family and corporate matters, and routes complex queries to specialist sub-agents handling legal research, document summarisation, case analysis and drafting assistance. The drafting sub-agent generates preliminary versions of legal documents, including petitions, notices and agreements, which lawyers or users can review and modify. A compliance module intercepts all responses before delivery, validating them against legal, ethical and jurisdictional criteria and appending disclaimers where needed.

Success rates

In evaluations, the system achieved 72 per cent response accuracy and 74 per cent retrieval precision. Domain classification precision reached 70 per cent across the five categories.

Criminal law and constitutional law recorded the highest precision, at 75 per cent and 73 per cent, respectively, which the authors attribute to cleaner terminology and stronger knowledge base coverage.

Corporate law recorded the lowest precision at 65 per cent. The reason is jurisdictional overlap: A question about a company’s acquisition, for instance, may fall simultaneously under the Companies Act, SEBI regulations, RBI guidelines and FEMA provisions, each administered by a different regulatory body with its own rules. The system must determine which framework applies before it can retrieve the right documents.

Causes of failure

Error analysis identified legal jargon complexity as the primary source of failure, accounting for 35 per cent of errors, given that the system is designed partly for users without specialist legal training. Jurisdictional ambiguity contributed 28 per cent, reflecting the difficulty of handling queries that span multiple regulatory regimes. Context misunderstanding, where the system responded to a different question than the one asked, contributed 22 per cent. Out-of-domain queries accounted for the remaining 15 per cent.

The paper’s authors identify several directions for future development, including integration with the Supreme Court judgement repository and the India Code portal, multilingual support for Hindi and other regional languages, real-time update pipelines to keep the knowledge base current with evolving legislation, predictive analytics for legal outcomes based on historical case law, and support for user-uploaded documents to enable AI-assisted review of case-specific materials. The code has been made available to the public.

Published on June 15, 2026

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How the US funding cut impacts cancer research

by Hansraj Agrawal | Jun 14, 2026 | Science

The detrimental effect of the US government’s move to cut funding for global healthcare programmes is widely known, but research now shows the quantum of the decline in funding.

A paper published by Anbang Du of the University of Southampton, UK, and others shows how medical advancement may be impacted if the US were to, hypothetically, end funding for all academic research. Moreover, the US is home to not only the largest R&D hubs globally but also major funders of research, and leads in scientific publication, intellectual property and clinical trial capacity.

The study shows that the government change in the US in 2024-25 was followed by an estimated 40.6 per cent reduction in central US funding for research agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2026. It looked at 1,07,955 funding awards totalling $51.4 billion globally.

The researchers modelled the cancer science ecosystem across a five-layered network, covering 233 countries and territories. The layers include grants, clinical trials, publications, inventions and patents. They found that the inequality between the West and low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) was most evident at the monetary end of the chain — namely grants and patents.

“The existing capacity in the research and innovation ecosystem might limit LMICs’ ability to acquire sufficient funding from international funders and commercialise the knowledge,” the report says.

Countries such as the US and China dominate all five layers and are, hence, at the core of the cancer science network, while smaller economies only partake of the paper-related layer and are seen as peripheral.

Low-income countries participate actively in the publication layer, but their presence is significantly diluted when it comes to clinical trials, inventions and patents. The study has also come up with evidence of ‘tokenism’ in paper publication — when it comes to prestigious first- or last-name authorship positions, the involvement of researchers from low-income countries dips sharply, which also impacts their ability to generate research income.

Ultimately, this leads to a ‘brain drain’ — researchers tend to migrate to richer nations that can potentially offer them key roles in funding and capital creation.

The study postulates that the hypothetical removal of the US from the system causes a dramatic 50-plus per cent loss of efficiency.

What is the way out? The researchers suggest that other countries should scale up to make up for the decline in US funding. The largest contributions across the grants-to-inventions lifecycle will have to come from the European Union. They also suggest how other regions such as BRICS, which includes India, should chime in as well.

Published on June 15, 2026

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Fishing out fake news using a deep-learning neural network

by Hansraj Agrawal | May 31, 2026 | Science

Researchers at the ABV-Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Gwalior, have developed a new artificial intelligence system that combines text analysis, image recognition and fuzzy logic to detect fake news in Indian media with high accuracy.

The system, called F2IND-IT! (fuzzy fake Indian news detection using images and text), was described in a recent paper uploaded to arXiv. The researchers say the project addresses a growing challenge in India, where rapid internet penetration and social media use have accelerated the spread of misinformation.

According to data from the Press Information Bureau, under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1,575 fake news cases were reported between 2022 and March 2025. The number rose from 338 in 2022 to 583 in 2024. Data from the National Crime Records Bureau also show a 214 per cent increase in fake news cases during the early pandemic period from 2018 to 2020. A 2024 study by ISB and CyberPeace found that 46 per cent of false information was about politics, and over 77 per cent of it spread through social media platforms. Another survey among Gen Z users in Delhi found that 91 per cent believe fake news can affect election outcomes.

To tackle the problem, the researchers designed a multimodal AI model that analyses both the written content of news articles and the accompanying images. The framework uses DistilBERT — a lightweight language-processing model — to understand text semantics, while a convolutional neural network (ResNet-50), which is a deep-learning image recognition system, extracts visual features from photographs. These inputs are then combined using an ‘attention mechanism’ and processed through an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), which produces a probability score indicating whether a news item is fake or genuine.

The model was trained and tested on the Indian Fake News Dataset (IFND), which contains more than 56,000 news articles spanning politics, elections, Covid-19, violence and other topics. According to the paper, the proposed system achieved an accuracy of nearly 98 per cent, outperforming several alternative model configurations in ablation studies.

The researchers say future versions could rely less on manually designed fuzzy rules and instead use data-driven systems capable of dynamically generating their own inference structures during training.

Published on June 1, 2026

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IIT-Kanpur hosts India’s first DORIS beacon

by Hansraj Agrawal | May 31, 2026 | Science

The setting up of India’s first DORIS ground beacon at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, is an important but somewhat under-the-radar step in India’s space and earth observation capabilities. DORIS — short for ‘Doppler orbitography and radio-positioning integrated by satellite’ — is a French system that tracks satellites and ground stations with centimetre-level accuracy.

The beacon at IIT-Kanpur is part of a global network of DORIS ground stations. Satellites carrying DORIS receivers use signals transmitted from these beacons to calculate their own position precisely. Because a satellite moves very fast overhead, the frequency of the signal changes slightly due to the Doppler effect — the same effect that makes a passing train horn sound different as it moves away. By measuring these tiny frequency shifts from beacons around the world, the satellite can calculate its exact position and speed.

This accuracy is crucial for missions involving ocean altimetry, climate studies, mapping the earth’s gravity field, monitoring sea-level rise and glacier movement, tracking tectonic shifts, and precise satellite orbit determination.

A satellite measuring ocean height, for instance, may detect just a few millimetres of change per year. That measurement becomes meaningful only when scientists can know the satellite’s orbit with centimetre-level accuracy. Otherwise, they cannot tell whether the ocean rose, or whether the satellite drifted slightly. DORIS helps remove that uncertainty.

The system has been used in major international satellite missions such as Jason, Sentinel, CryoSat and the Indo-French SARAL/AltiKa.

The beacon at IIT-Kanpur strengthens India’s role in global space geodesy — the science of precisely measuring the earth’s shape, rotation and gravitational behaviour — and deepens Indo-French cooperation in the space sector.

Systems like GPS, VLBI (radio astronomy timing), laser ranging and DORIS together form the backbone of modern earth measurement.

Benefits for India

“The establishment of the DORIS beacon in India represents enhances the national geodetic infrastructure and participation in the global geodetic community,” says Prof Onkar Dikshit of IIT-Kanpur.

“It will help establish a highly accurate and stable national terrestrial reference framework for surveying, mapping, infrastructure development, satellite navigation, disaster management, smart city planning, and other strategic applications,” he said. In addition, the Indian subcontinent is tectonically active due to the interaction between the Indian and Eurasian plates, making continuous geodetic monitoring critically important for understanding crustal deformation, intraplate tectonics, land subsidence, uplift, and seismic hazards, he said.

Accurate geodetic monitoring can aid urban subsidence assessment in rapidly growing cities, improve floodplain mapping, and enhance coastal vulnerability assessments in regions affected by sea-level rise and cyclones. The data products derived from DORIS-supported satellite missions can contribute to precision agriculture, water resource management, glacier monitoring in the Himalayas, and early warning systems for natural hazards such as earthquakes, landslides, and floods.

Enhanced satellite orbit determination also improves the quality of remote sensing products used in weather forecasting, environmental monitoring, fisheries management, and maritime navigation, directly benefiting societal planning and sustainable development initiatives.

Beyond national applications, the DORIS station strengthens India’s contribution to international Earth observation and climate research programmes. The inclusion of India within the global DORIS network fills an important geographic gap in the international space geodetic observing system and enhances the robustness of global reference frame realisation. By hosting such advanced geodetic infrastructure, IIT-Kanpur positions India as an active contributor to the global space geodesy community while simultaneously advancing indigenous capabilities in satellite geodesy, precise positioning, and earth system science.

How IIT Kanpur got in

In 2022, the International DORIS Service (IDS) announced a global call for proposals to establish a new DORIS station, and the proposal submitted by IIT-Kanpur was evaluated by the IDS Selection Committee against several technical and scientific criteria. These included network coverage and tectonic plate contribution, co-location with other geodetic instruments, antenna environment, monument stability, maintenance and security provisions, host institution capability, and prospects for scientific collaboration.

One of the major strengths of the IIT-Kanpur proposal was its strategic geographic location on the northern part of the Indian tectonic plate, addressing a significant gap in the current DORIS network. At present, the only operational DORIS station located on the Indian plate is the MALE station in the Maldives, while the Everest station lies near the Indian–Eurasian plate boundary. The DORIS station at the National Centre for Geodesy (NCG) at IIT-Kanpur will provide improved spatial coverage for monitoring inter-plate and intra-plate tectonic deformation across the Indian region. The station will also enable integrated geodetic studies using both DORIS and GNSS observations for crustal motion and reference frame applications.

A key motivation behind the selection of IIT-Kanpur was the existing technical strength and proposed future plans related to space geodesy at the NCG , along with the significant geographic gap in the existing DORIS network across the Indian region, where no DORIS station is today co-located with other major space geodetic techniques, particularly GNSS.

Published on June 1, 2026

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