Talha Humayun

Voyager 1 will only travel this far in 1 million years…

Voyager 1, humanity’s furthest ambassador, is hurtling through the void at 38,000 mph on a journey destined to outlast the human race.

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 has officially entered the interstellar medium, currently screaming through the vacuum more than 15 billion miles away from Earth. At its current speed of 38,000 miles per hour, a radio signal takes over 22 hours to reach us, yet the spacecraft has barely begun its cosmic odyssey. In approximately 300 years, it will reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud, a massive shell of icy objects surrounding our solar system, but it will take another 30,000 years just to emerge from the other side. Despite its incredible velocity, the craft remains a slow mover on a galactic scale, highlighting the staggering vastness of the universe we inhabit.

As its plutonium power source fades, Voyager 1 will eventually become a silent monument to human curiosity. Carrying the Golden Record—a copper phonograph filled with the sounds and images of Earth—the craft acts as a 'message in a bottle' cast into the cosmic ocean. Because the interstellar void is so empty, the chances of a collision are nearly zero, making Voyager effectively immortal. It is destined to drift through the Milky Way for billions of years, serving as a permanent mark of our species that will endure long after our own sun begins its final transformation. Even in silence, it remains our most daring reaching into the dark.

source: National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (2024). Voyager 1: The Interstellar Mission. NASA Science Missions.

Imagine a place where the world’s smartest people, Arabs, Persians, Indians, Greeks, Africans all worked together under one roof, experimenting, arguing, discovering, and rewriting the future. That was Baghdad’s House of Wisdom, the most extraordinary brain-center of the 9th century, a place so advanced it makes modern research labs look slow. Inside these golden halls, scholars cracked complex math problems, calculated the Earth’s circumference with shocking accuracy, invented algebra, designed star maps, studied medicine, and translated entire libraries of ancient knowledge into Arabic. It was like a super-charged “Google of the ancient world,” where every idea was welcome and every question encouraged. At night, the observatories glowed as astronomers tracked planets; by day, physicians practiced surgery and chemists cooked up early scientific experiments. For 400 years, Baghdad wasn’t just a city, it was the beating heart of global knowledge, proving that when humans share ideas freely, they can light up the world.

This painting shows a woman from Dagestan (Caucasus) standing without her head covering, (hijab) holding her scarf in her hand.

She is standing between two heavily armed rival groups of men. The men have turned their face away from the woman (Ghair-Mahram).

This was often the tradition in Caucasus (Qafqaz) in order to stop the bloodshed.

When a woman felt the danger of casualties amongst the different clans, she would often enter among the rival fighting crowd of men. Whilst entering she would take off her head-covering, out of respect for the woman, the men would turn their eyes downwards and move away. This would eventually cease the fight.

The concept of dignity, chivalry and the extreme respect for women stemmed from both religious and traditional values. Women utilised this to help save many lives as well as bloodshed in the past.

Renowned Pakistani educationist and women’s rights activist Dr. Arfa Syeda Zehra has passed away, as confirmed by actor, director, and producer Adeel Hashmi on his official Facebook page.

Dr. Zehra was deeply admired for her lifelong dedication as a teacher, researcher, and intellectual voice in Pakistan’s academic and social circles.

Throughout her career, Dr. Zehra championed education, ethics, and women’s empowerment, earning wide recognition for her contributions to academia and social reform.

Her death marks the loss of one of Pakistan’s most respected scholars, leaving a profound void in the country’s intellectual and social landscape as tributes pour in from across sectors.

#copied

RIP James D. Watson (1928–2025) 🧬

James Watson, the American molecular biologist who helped uncover the double helix structure of DNA, has passed away at 97.

Back in 1953, Watson and Francis Crick built the model that showed DNA as two intertwined strands carrying the code of life. Their work relied heavily on crucial X ray images from Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, and the three men later shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Watson went on to lead Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for decades, mentor generations of scientists, and help shape the future of genetics and molecular medicine.

A towering, if complicated, figure whose work changed how we understand heredity, disease, and life itself. Thoughts go out to his family, colleagues, and everyone he inspired. 🕊️

Internet speed across Pakistan has slowed again during peak hours (7 PM–11 PM). This is due to problems with two undersea cable routes and heavy traffic on the remaining submarine networks.

The slowdown is affecting businesses, freelancers, and especially the call center industry, which is facing major losses due to unstable connectivity.

Experts are urging the government to improve Pakistan’s digital infrastructure for a faster and more reliable internet in the future.

Disclaimer: Information is based on official reports and is subject to verification. The background image is AI-generated and used only for illustration.

Imagine being able to edit life itself, fixing genetic mistakes, curing diseases, or even changing how organisms behave. Sounds like science fiction? It’s not anymore. Thanks to a revolutionary technology called CRISPR, scientists can now cut and edit DNA with incredible precision.

CRISPR stands for "Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats" a mouthful of words, but its idea is beautifully simple. It was first discovered in bacteria, which use CRISPR as a natural defense system against viruses. When a virus attacks, the bacteria “remember” its DNA and cut it out if it returns.

Scientists realized they could hijack this bacterial system to edit genes in any living organism, plants, animals, even humans. Using an enzyme called Cas9, CRISPR works like molecular scissors that cut DNA at a chosen spot. Then, scientists can remove, replace, or fix specific genes.

This tool has already been used to create disease-resistant crops, explore cures for genetic disorders like sickle cell anemia, and even attempt editing mosquito DNA to fight malaria.

But CRISPR also raises deep ethical questions: Should we edit human embryos? Could “designer babies” become real one day? Science is moving fast, but humanity must decide where to draw the line.

CRISPR has opened the door to a new era, one where we don’t just study life, we reprogram it.