The Bharat Innovates 2026 National Basecamp was inaugurated at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN), marking a significant milestone in India’s efforts to identify, strengthen, and globally position its most promising deep-tech innovations. Held from December 18 to 20, 2025, the three-day event brings together approximately 400 startups and research-led innovations that have been shortlisted through a rigorous national screening process. Organised under the aegis of the Ministry of Education and the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) to the Government of India, and coordinated jointly by the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) and IITGN, the event saw attendance from scientific luminaries, founders, business leaders, venture capitalists, investors, and sci-tech enthusiasts. 

Speakers at the inaugural session highlighted the programme’s role in strengthening research commercialisation, industry–academia linkages, and policy-backed innovation ecosystems. The closed-door pitching sessions and open deep tech exhibition showcased Innovations spanning 13 strategic domains, including AI, semiconductors, energy, healthcare, manufacturing, and space technologies. The Basecamp serves as a critical mentoring and evaluation stage ahead of the International Showcase to be held next year in France, where Indian technologies will take their place on the global stage. 

Multimillion research to create the first ever 3D movies of black holes will combine pioneering international expertise in black hole imaging with cutting-edge artificial intelligence developed in the UK.

Dr Kazunori Akiyama has been awarded a £4 million Faraday Discovery Fellowship through the programme's Accelerated International Route, to be hosted by Heriot-Watt University. The project, named TomoGrav, brings together the pathbreaking expertise of Dr Kazunori Akiyama and Professor Yves Wiaux.

Dr Akiyama developed one of the computational imaging algorithms and co-led the entire imaging team as part of the wider Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration efforts to create the first images of black holes.   Professor Yves Wiaux’s groundbreaking artificial intelligence algorithms are transforming how scientists reconstruct images from incomplete data. 

Dr Akiyama and Professor Wiaux are supported by a multidisciplinary team of 10 world-renowned partners from across the world, whose combined expertise will deliver the work.

The funding will see Dr Akiyama move from his present role as a Research Scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Haystack Observatory in the USA to Heriot-Watt University in Scotland as part of the scheme which provides long-term funding to talented mid-career researchers.

Using revolutionary imaging technology, the research is expected to transform understanding of the universe's most extreme environments by revealing how black holes behave and evolve across time.

Black holes are cosmic laboratories where gravity results as a byproduct of the warping of spacetime. Gas swirling around them is heated to extreme temperatures and accelerated to nearly light speed, generating powerful jets of magnetised plasma that are thought to influence the form of the largest scale structures in the universe.

The new research builds on the 2019 and 2022 photographs of two supermassive black holes, M87* and Sagittarius A*, which captivated billions of people worldwide and opened an entirely new scientific area which uses imaging to study gravity and black holes.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — NASA’s VIPER rover, designed to map water on the moon, has reached another major milestone with help from Sandia National Laboratories and its one-of-a-kind testing capabilities.

“We’ve built a rover that is designed to go and prospect for water on the moon, but the vehicle must be certified for mission,” said Dave Petri, NASA VIPER system integration and test lead. “We need to be sure its structure is properly designed and built to survive the mission, including the launch environment.”

In 2004, a bright point of light in the debris disk surrounding Fomalhaut was thought to be an exoplanet. But the spot disappeared. The 2023 appearance of a second bright spot in the disk led astronomers to reconsider. They now believe these are the first direct observations of collisions between planetesimals in a star system not our own. It cautions astronomers to not presume that faint points of light around a star are planets.

Astronomers directly imaged two separate collisions between rocky objects in the Fomalhaut star system. Scientists previously thought the aftermath of one collision was a dust-covered exoplanet, reflecting starlight. Observable collisions provide unprecedented insights into the processes of planet formation.