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They went to space and came back...older? 

After nine months in space, NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore are back on Earth— and looking a little different. Williams, in particular, turned heads with her newly greyed hair. NASA explained that space accelerates ageing-like changes, from rapid hair greying to muscle and bone loss. “Imagine if all of your physiological changes were hyper-accelerated so that you passed through life cycles in weeks instead of decades. You’d be able to grow a beard overnight, your hair might start greying in days, or menopause could arrive by next weekend,” they shared. The duo launched aboard Boeing’s Starliner on June 5, 2024, for what was meant to be a week-long mission. Instead, technical issues kept them in orbit for over nine months before their dramatic return on March 19 aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft.

From obscurity to record-breaker 

Painter MF Husain’s 1954 masterpiece, Untitled (Gram Yatra), sold for a record $13.7 million [`117 crore approximately] at Christie’s New York—almost four times its estimate. This makes it the most expensive Indian painting ever auctioned, dethroning Amrita Sher-Gil’s The Storyteller (1937). A 13-panel visual journey through post-independence India, the work had been hidden away in a Norwegian hospital for decades before hitting the auction block.

Breaking the mould in animation 

The Latvian adventure film Flow, created by Gints Zilbalodis, has made history by bagging the Oscar for Best Animated Feature at the 2025 Academy Awards, beating movies like Inside Out 2 and The Wild Robot. And get this—it was made entirely on Blender, which is a free, open-source animation software. Zilbalodis, who began developing Flow in 2019, told Blender.org, “Blender’s speed and flexibility allowed us to focus on storytelling rather than being constrained by technical limitations.” Proof that you don’t need a Hollywood budget to create something extraordinary!

Censorship showdown 

Elon Musk’s X is taking the Indian government to court, accusing the IT ministry of unlawfully expanding censorship powers. The lawsuit claims that “countless” government officials can now order content takedowns more easily—without the strict legal safeguards previously required. X argues that a government website launched last year is being used as a workaround to bypass oversight and enforce broad censorship. While the Indian government is yet to respond, this legal battle comes as Musk prepares to launch Starlink and Tesla in India.

Fur real! 

Dire wolves—a species that went extinct almost 12,500 years ago, and were made popular by the HBO series Game of Thrones—have been revived (yes, really!). Through genetic engineering, three pups—two six-months-olds named Romulus and Remus, and one female pup born on January 30, have been “created” by Texas-based Colossal Biosciences. They used cloning, gene editing, and the DNA of their closest living relative—the gray wolf—to do so. And that’s not the end of it. Colossal also plans to ressurect the mammoth, dodo, and Tasmanian tiger.

Drake takes the L 

In the latest twist of what feels like a never-ending rap feud, Universal Music Group (UMG) is clapping back at Drake’s lawsuit over their promotion of Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us, calling it nothing more than a sore loser move. The motion claims that Drake “lost a rap battle that he provoked and in which he willingly participated. Instead of accepting the loss like the unbothered rap artist he often claims to be, he has sued his own record label in a misguided attempt to salve his wounds. Plaintiff’s complaint is utterly without merit and should be dismissed with prejudice.” They also call out the double standard—if Drake expected support for his Lamar diss tracks, why shouldn’t the same apply in reverse? UMG insists the lawsuit is baseless and should be thrown out for good.

This article originally appeared in the March-April 2025 print edition of Cosmopolitan India. 

Images: Getty, Shutterstock, and Instagram

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