Number of words: 5,810 “I want to murder this thing,” says John Cleese, fiddling with a medical contraption that’s attached to his leg. The 77-year-old founding member of the Monty Python comedy troupe — arguably humanity’s greatest comedic endeavor — and the star and co-creator of perennial best-sitcom-ever contender Fawlty Towers, is in his office on … Read more

Number of words: 596 In fascinating new research, cosmologists explain the history of the universe as one of self-teaching, autodidactic algorithms. The scientists, including physicists from Brown University and the Flatiron Institute, say the universe has probed all the possible physical laws before landing on the ones we observe around us today. Could this wild idea … Read more

Number of words: 307 Spider webs are some of the most complex natural structures and form an intricate network of 3D structures that they use to hunt and breed. A group of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have now translated the structure of a web into music. They also claim that the structure … Read more

Number of words: 819 In North Carolina, officers arrested a six-year-old Black boy for picking a tulip near his bus stop. The aftermath of this flower-picking incident shows racism can blossom at any time. Inequality doesn’t wait until a Black person reaches a particular age or milestone. Rather, systemic racism starts impacting children at a young age … Read more

Number of words: 1,298 RANGE: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein. Published by arrangement with Riverhead, a member of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2019 by David Epstein. The boy’s father could tell something was different. At six months old, the boy could balance on his father’s palm as he … Read more

Number of words: 931 The writer is an author on management and his next book is ‘Excellence Now: Extreme Humanism’ This month McKinsey agreed to pay nearly $600m to settle claims that its advice had exacerbated the deadly US opioid crisis. The consultancy advised Purdue Pharma on paying “rebates” to pharmacies based on the number … Read more

Number of words: 923 MUMBAI: After several failed attempts, Dhanesh Parashar, a 36-year-old cashew farmer from Dodamarg in the Sindhudurg district has finally found a new ally in his struggle to keep free-ranging elephants from chomping down on his crop: honey bees.NSyes, elephants — the largest animal on land — are afraid of bees. So intensely that the … Read more

Number of words: 349 Researchers from the University of Cambridge have developed a first-of-kind device that converts sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water into carbon-neutral fuel. This conversion takes place without requiring any additional components or electricity. This device is a major step towards achieving artificial photosynthesis, which is a process mimicking the ability of plants … Read more

Number of words: 766 It’s been a rough few years for people who have a fear of clowns. In the wake of the ‘clown attack’ craze that reached a fever pitch in 2016, movies about creepy clowns have taken over the entertainment landscape. This fall alone, ads featuring the white-painted faces of characters like IT … Read more

Number of words: 1,648 In 1872, with the publication of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin went rogue. Only a decade after the anatomist Duchenne de Boulogne’s produced the first neurology text illustrated by photographs, Darwin claimed to be the first to use photographs in a scientific publication to actually … Read more