Why urban diseases like rabies and dengue are so hard to control Less than a kilometre from Bengaluru’s Lalbagh botanical garden lies the Bisilu Maramma Devi temple. The goddess has another name: Plague Maramma. Devotees believe that the deity harnesses the sun’s power to kill bacteria and viruses and ward off illnesses. The temple […]
Beauty and bias in perceiving art “I feel like we are nearing the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves.” Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese animator and co-founder of the renowned production house Studio Ghibli, uttered these words in 2016 after seeing an AI-generated animation film for the first time. Nine years […]
Why some enjoy the subject for what it is Let us begin with an unusual counting puzzle. Imagine two blocks labelled 1 and 2, next to each other on the ground beside a wall. Assume that the ground is frictionless, and that the blocks will not lose energy when they hit each other or […]
Can it help us understand the unknown universe? One day in the spring of 1543, a canon named Nicolaus Copernicus, lying on his sickbed, suddenly awoke from a coma that he had been put under because of a brain stroke. Resting beside him was the first copy of his magnum opus: De revolutionibus orbium […]
How did life emerge on Earth? (Spoiler alert: We still don’t know) On a cold winter evening in 1952, in a dimly lit lab at the University of Chicago, Stanley Miller, a 22-year-old graduate student, stared at the murky brown sludge in the shake flask in front of him, his stomach sinking. Days of […]
The consequences of leaving females out of biological studies Abha Khandelwal vividly remembers some of her unusual cardiac cases, a lot of them women. Like the 35-year-old woman who was watching her son play football when she suddenly felt nauseated. The mother brushed it off, wanting to stay and watch her son’s game. […]
Can scientists solve the conundrum of consciousness? Sometime in the late 1980s, two Oxford scientists examined PS, a patient who had suffered damage to the right side of her brain. The damage left her unable to notice things to her left. Even when she drew objects, she would draw their right sides perfectly […]
The lensing of waves is helping us look deeper into space Arthur Eddington was growing anxious. It was nearly 2 pm on 29 May 1919. The British astronomer was standing on a plateau overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in the west African island of Príncipe. A rare solar eclipse, not seen in 500 years, […]
Going beyond the ‘reuse, reduce, recycle’ model to curb plastic pollution I turn off the alarm on my phone, slowly wake up, turn the fan switch off, and head to the bathroom. I push paste out of a tube onto my toothbrush, and brush my teeth. Then, I scoop water out of a peach-coloured […]
Have we pushed the Earth beyond habitable conditions? Twenty four years ago, Govindasamy Bala was a young physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the USA. He and his colleague, Ken Caldeira, were carrying out research using a comprehensive climate model. For the first time, they wanted to test an improbable and controversial […]
