When I was referred to a documentary film on India’s scientific greats by its maker Raja Choudhury this week, I was wondering if there’d be anything beyond what I already know about them in the hour-long film. To find this out, it also meant dedicating an hour to watch the film on YouTube with its infamous buffering time. But I was ready to endure that, partly because the title of the film was inviting — The Quantum Indians — and partly because I had not been able to take up Raja’s earlier offer to feature in this film as an ‘expert’ on India’s science.

Colombia doesn’t have a space program, but as of Friday, it does have an elite aerospace engineering team. RoboCol, a group of 15 assorted engineering students and two designers from the Bogota-based Andes University, finished fourth place out of 50 international participants in the Lunabotics Mining Competition held at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for its work on “Intensity”, a robot designed to traverse lunar terrain.

Ethiopia's decision to begin diverting the course of the Blue Nile (the largest of the Nile river’s branches), as a prelude to the construction of the Renaissance Dam, put Egyptian diplomacy in a difficult position and stirred fears over Cairo’s declining share in the Nile waters, but the Egyptian presidency managed to tame these fears.

While some suggest suspension of the ongoing gradual switch off of the analogue technology implemented in region after region, others call for more time for preparation as the agreed international deadline is June, 2015. The Media Owners Association of Tanzania (MOAT), for example, requested the government to reconsider the decision, saying the digital migration has left thousands of ordinary viewers in Dar es Salaam, Tanga and Dodoma regions by failing to afford decoders.

India will launch its first space mission to Mars this year, President PranabMukherjee said on Thursday. "Several space missions are planned for 2013, including India's first mission to Mars and the launch of our first navigational satellite,"