Bhavya Chowdhury Number of words: 3,114 In the spring of 1894, Waldemar Haffkine travelled to Calcutta in the Indian province of Bengal in search of cholera. Spring was cholera season in the city, and Haffkine was hopeful. He had arrived in India the previous March armed with what he believed was a vaccine for the disease, but … Read more
Number of words: 729 Having risen to fame on its superhuman performance at playing games, the artificial intelligence group DeepMind has cracked a serious scientific problem that has stumped researchers for half a century.With its latest AI program, AlphaFold, the company and research laboratory showed it can predict how proteins fold into 3D shapes, a … Read more
Number of words: 4,884 Peter Turchin, one of the world’s experts on pine beetles and possibly also on human beings, met me reluctantly this summer on the campus of the University of Connecticut at Storrs, where he teaches. Like many people during the pandemic, he preferred to limit his human contact. He also doubted whether … Read more
Number of words: 564 Strong, stretchy and sensitive synthetic skin that can repair itself up to 5,000 times has been developed and could be used in future prosthetics, experts claim. Known as ‘electronic skin’ or ‘e-skin’, it has been developed by researchers from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. The team … Read more
Number of words: 353 On November 1, the Mumbai Police arrested three Ola cab drivers for allegedly conning several passengers by manipulating the mobile application to add more kilometres to the destination, thereby increasing the fare. The police found that at least 40 cab drivers had taken advantage of a glitch in an outdated version … Read more
Number of words: 397 Ahmedabad: ‘I could not clear the final summer internship interviews for my top 3 preferred firms despite being on hotlist inone of them,’ writes a student. Another writes, ‘I failed in Class XII exam as I didn’t know how to write in English.’These are just the two of the 26 and … Read more
Number of words: 592 In 1981, a Soviet submarine ran aground on the south coast of Sweden, just 6.2 miles from a Swedish naval base. The Soviets claimed that they were forced into Swedish territory by severe distress, and later navigation errors, while Sweden saw it as proof that the then Soviet Union was pissing … Read more
Number of words: 740 Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the legions of philosophers (lesser known, which is a travesty) from early 20th century. He is best known for language games – one of the questions that he posed: ‘Are you using a ruler to measure the table or the table to measure the ruler?’ This … Read more
Number of words: 1,261 It was a cool November morning in 1973, and palaeontologist Vijay Prakash Mishra knocked around for fossils along the flat-topped hills in Kutch, Gujarat. “There had been reports that there were large skulls but nobody in India, in fact, had identified them,” said 78-year-old Ashok Sahni, the sensei of Indian palaeontology … Read more
Number of words: 1,474 Of the insect world’s many architects, the termites are undoubtedly the reigning monarchs. The earthen mounds that these tiny insects construct out of soil, water and their own saliva, are as intricate, if not more intricate, than human-made castles. The enigmatic structures have intrigued biologists, inspired architects, and even captivated robotics … Read more
Copyright © 2022 Bulls Eye - All rights reserved