I wonder if anyone knows how old the name of the town Indri in Haryana between kurukShetra and the yamunA is? Is it something recent or going back to the old Aryan days of the dominance of the aindra strand of the religion: reminds one of indraprastha to the south. Nearby Pehowa

The pa~nchaprasthAH along the yamunA of the late (Indian) vedic age.

Populations density in the core subcontinent and adjacent regions

The sun is a periodic variable star, and this is seen in sunspot count. People have been recording sunspots since the 1700s in the West. We are in the third cycle of the current century, and it has already gone past the maximum of the last cycle of this century, which was

Arp 142: The Penguin with its egg galaxies from JWST: A spiral galaxy being unwound by a massive elliptical galaxy

Orion Horse Head nebula through 3 telescopes. One of my lifelong memories -- the kind of thing that you might not be able to do again is seeing this in a remarkably dark spot with just a 152.5 mm reflector

One of the dramatic images from JWST: 2 neutron stars fired out from a galaxy and racing 120000 light-years -- more than the diameter of the Milky Way before banging into each other as a kilonova. We had imagined if such a thing might happen as a youth -- it has been some waiting

There have probably been 100s of trillions of planets with current human or higher *intelligent* life in the visible universe as a lower bound. However, they probably lasted 1-5 million years before going extinct. We don't think there are any intergalactic civilizations. We don't

The earth is 4.54 Billion years old. For most of that period, Earth had life on it. From at least around 4.1-4.2 Bya there was life on earth. The neural foundations for high intelligence -- say dog, cat or heron level -- emerged only in the late Triassic 227 *Million* years ago.

A massive eruption of fruiting bodies after a recent rain: probably Hydnum, which is mycorrhizal with many of the trees in the locale

A possible Trametes growing on severed trunk.

From the response to this it is clear most Indian users are quite young

While I'm not into chess, it is interesting to note the two drAviDa & 2 telugu states put together are overrepresented among the top-ranked Indian players. Wonder why that is so -- due to Anand or something else.

The incredible JWST image of the start Wolf-Rayet 124 in the constellation Sagitta -- a rare W spectral type star -- with the nebula it has emitted. While it has a radius of ~12 times the Sun with ~ 30 times its mass, its luminosity is a whopping 562,000 times that of the Sun.

The ramifications of this are wider than the current Israel-M conflict in West Asia. One can make a strong prediction that a big fraction of the same students and faculty who are calling for this will all take all manner of anti-H positions & call for compromising H security in

Action relating to matters of significance to H cannot be really discussed on SM. This includes things like adulteration of the tirumala laDDu-s. Outrage can be expressed and awareness can be raised but actual action is a different thing.