NewsBytes

A new generation of workforce the Gen Z -- those under the age of 35 -- is rewriting the rules of career growth, as they are stepping away from conventional education pathways, questioning linear career growth, and disengaging from rigid corporate cultures, a senior executive of a digital recruitment platform said. India is home to the world's largest youth workforce. And within that, Gen Z is rapidly emerging as a force of its own, they are expected to comprise 27 per cent of India's workforce by 2025. "We are witnessing a profound generational shift in the workplace, one that challenges not just how we recruit, but why we exist as employers. India is at the heart of this change," said Devashish Sharma, Founding Member and CEO Taggd, a digital recruitment platform. Gen Z is giving more importance to purpose than perks, and a non-linear growth in career over guarantees. For Gen Z, flexibility is a non-negotiable standard. The 9-to-5 model doesn't resonate for them. Gen Z values independence in how they work. They prefer flexible schedules, asynchronous collaboration, and environments that reward outcomes over hours.

In a significant stride toward cleaner and more efficient metallurgy, Russia's National Research University "Moscow Power Engineering Institute" (MPEI) has unveiled a groundbreaking method for iron recovery that could reshape steel production worldwide. The university said MPEI scientists have developed a proprietary process that extracts iron directly from ore using a hydrocarbon and natural gas mixture, cutting out the traditional stage of pig iron production entirely. The method relies on a specially designed reactor where iron reduction occurs in a continuous, liquid-phase cycle. Remarkably, the entire operation takes no more than 12 minutes. Unlike conventional methods that rely on bulky infrastructure to generate reducing gas, this new approach functions without any need for auxiliary systems. The result is a streamlined process that slashes production costs, drastically reduces harmful emissions, and nearly halves the energy consumption associated with traditional steelmaking.

The University of Liverpool is set to open a campus in Bengaluru and will welcome its first batch of students in August next year, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan announced on Monday, as he handed over the Letter of Intent to the varsity administration here. The move comes after the University of Liverpool, part of the United Kingdom's Russell Group, received formal approval from the University Grants Commission (UGC) to open the first foreign university campus in Bengaluru. The University of Southampton was the first UK university to receive approval and is set to start offering academic programs in Gurugram by July, 2025. Pradhan also announced that 15 foreign universities will be coming to India by this academic year.

Polycystic Ovary Syndrome or PCOS impacts women's focus by decreasing speed of response by about 56 per cent and accuracy by about 10 per cent, researchers from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) said.  PCOS is an endocrine disorder in women, with symptoms like irregular or absent periods, polycystic ovaries, and increased levels of male hormone (androgen).

The findings emphasise the need to understand PCOS as a complex medical condition that not only affects physical but also cognitive health. In their recent study, Maitreyi Redkar and Prof Azizuddin Khan from the Psychophysiology Laboratory, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Bombay found that women with PCOS are slower to react and more easily distracted than their healthy counterparts. They assessed women with attention tasks after dividing them in two groups, 101 women with PCOS and 72 healthy women.