Number of words: 1,358 IF ONLY HUMANS could drink seawater without dying, we wouldn’t find ourselves floundering in a water crisis. To not die, first you have to boil saltwater and collect the pure vapor, or get yourself a fancy membrane that filters out all the salt and, conveniently, sea life.This is the controversial idea … Read more

Number of words: 1,350 It is difficult to introduce George Price. Perhaps we can start with the end. When George Price, aged 52, died in 1975, his funeral was attended by about a dozen people. Most of these people were squatters with whom he had shared the last part of his life. Also among the … Read more

Number of words: 1,265 Asha (not her real name) is the youngest bahu in a large joint family that stays in West Delhi. She got married a few months before India went into lockdown. Her husband works with an IT company in Gurgaon and is now having to work from home. Asha teaches chemistry to … Read more

Number of words: 858 For centuries, gastritis had rather vaguely been attributed to stress and neuroses. (In popular use, the term dyspeptic still refers to an irritable and fragile psychological state.) By extension, then, cancer of the stomach was cancer unleashed by neurotic stress, in essence a modern variant of the theory of clogged melancholia … Read more

Number of words: 778 In the early 1940s, a similar notion had gripped the eccentric Oxford geneticist Edmund Ford. A firm believer in Darwinian evolution, Ford nonetheless knew that Darwin’s theory suffered from an important limitation: thus far, the evolutionary progression had been inferred indirectly from the fossil record, but never demonstrated directly on a … Read more

Number of words: 168 In a waste ore called pitchblende, a black sludge that came from the peaty forests of Joachimsthal in what is now the Czech Republic, the Curies found the first signal of a new element—an element many times more radioactive than uranium. The Curies set about distilling the boggy sludge to trap … Read more

Number of words: 474 Moore’s hypothesis had an obvious corollary. If breast cancer relapsed due to the inadequacy of the original surgical excisions, then even more breast tissue should be removed during the initial operation. Since the margins of extirpation were the problem, then why not extend the margins? Moore argued that surgeons, attempting to … Read more

Number of words: 195 The proximity to medicine paid off. Subbarao made friends and connections at the hospital and switched to a day job as a researcher in the Division of Biochemistry. His initial project involved purifying molecules out of living cells, dissecting them chemically to determine their compositions— in essence, performing a biochemical “autopsy” … Read more

Number of words: 837 Poor diet is a major cause behind the COVID-19 deaths and the Indians must urgently cut down on ultra-processed food to build resilience against the deadly virus, a leading Indian-origin cardiologist in the UK has cautioned. Dr Aseem Malhotra, who is among the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) frontline medics and … Read more

Number of words: 2,289 In January and February of this year, there was audible popping of champagne corks in certain quarters of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. What some observers had long seen as this era’s giant geopolitical bubble had finally begun to deflate. China’s Communist Party leadership, the thinking went, was at last coming … Read more