Number of words – 1,995 Mark Zuckerberg drives a Volkswagen Golf. He pays himself an annual salary of a dollar. In 2006, at the age of 22, he turned down a billion times that for Facebook. In 2010, when his then-girlfriend (now wife) Priscilla Chan moved in to his home, he posted an update offering … Read more

Number of words – 1,371 Last month, DARPA announced the latest breakthrough in brain-controlled artificial limbs: a robotic arm that a user can actually feel. It works via neural implants that connect to a computer through an interface top of the user’s skull, and sends signals from there to the arm telling it how to … Read more

Number fo words – 1,470 Even as our democracy and our economy have become more vibrant, an important issue in the recent election was whether we had substituted the crony socialism of the past with crony capitalism, where the rich and the influential are alleged to have received land, natural resources and spectrum in return … Read more

Number of words – 467 National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) team has unearthed the world’s oldest known site to have been hit and submerged by a tsunami. Research provides an evidence of burial of parts of Dholavira, the ancient metropolitan port town of the Harappan period in Gujarat. Addressing the media alongwith the team of … Read more

Number of words – 367 Patients who undergo surgery during the night may be twice more likely to die than those operated on during regular working hours, a new study has claimed. Patients operated on later in the working day or in the early evening also have a higher mortality risk, according to researchers from … Read more

Number of words – 683 Scientists studying Uturuncu, a dormant volcano in Bolivia, have discovered evidence that violent volcanic eruptions may owe their origins to incredibly water-rich magma, far below Earth’s surface. According to the researchers, who published their findings in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, they started their search by analyzing rocks … Read more

Number of words – 275 Many animals cooperate effectively, and a few even give loans. The most famous lenders in nature are vampire bats. These vampires congregate in their thousands inside caves, and every night they fly out to look for prey. When they find a sleeping bird or a careless mammal, they make a … Read more

Number fo words – 754 The modern pursuit of power is fuelled by the alliance between scientific progress and economic growth. For most of history science progressed at a snail’s pace, while the economy was in deep freeze. The gradual increase in human population did lead to a corresponding increase in production, and sporadic discoveries … Read more

Number of words – 281 In the late nineteenth century, several European powers laid claim to African territories. Fearing that conflicting claims might lead to an all-out European war, the concerned parties got together in Berlin in 1884, and divided Africa as if it were a pie. Back then, much of the African interior was … Read more

Number fo words – 256 When the Nazis overran France in the spring of 1940, much of its Jewish population tried to escape the country. In order to cross the border south, they needed visas to Spain and Portugal, and tens of thousands of Jews, along with many other refugees, besieged the Portuguese consulate in … Read more