Number of words: 523 To be an inhabitant of a chawl is to be established. But in the nooks and crannies of this area there is – as always in India – yet another, lower human level, with people for whom there is no room have made home for themselves. They have founded squatter settlements, … Read more
Number of words: 408 The novel, which is a form of social enquiry, and as such outside the Indian tradition, had come to India with the British. By the late 19 century, it had become established in Bengal, and then had spread. But it was only towards the end of the British period, in the … Read more
Number of words: 373 Here is the piece of history. In the forties when the world recognised the genius of the little man who shook the mighty colonial empire and made the British to free India, the world’s top magazine Life thought it was imperative to publish a cover story on his great man. This … Read more
Number of words: 355 Trivers treated a parent animal as if it were a rational agent calculating what economists call the ‘opportunity cost’ of an action. A parent has to pay costs of rearing each offspring. Among these costs might be food, including time and effort spent gathering it, time spent protecting the child from … Read more
Number of words: 358 The genes are the immortals …[they] have an expectation of life that must be measured not in decades but in thousands and millions of years. In sexually reproducing species, the individual is too large too temporary a genetic unit to qualify as a significant unit of natural selection. The group of … Read more
Number of words: 581 The neo-Darwinian synthesis, as opposed to Darwin’s own version of his theory, is centred on the gene as the unit of natural selection. Genes are discrete entities that can be counted in a population, more or less ignoring the fact that they are in fact sitting in the cells of organisms. … Read more
Number of words: 843 The question Niko set for me was a version of the question often labelled with the ‘nature or nurture?’ Cliche derived from The Tempest:A devil, a born devil, on whose nature Nurture can never stick…. Philosophers down the centuries have pondered the question. How much of what we know is natively … Read more
Number of words: 1,647 Two years ago, Alice Agogino, a UC-Berkeley mechanical engineering professor, was working on a contract to build exploratory robots for NASA Ames. She had been recruited to help design what would eventually become a fleet of mobile, ultra-impact-resistant, remote-sensing robots that could protect sensitive scientific equipment during a drop from orbit … Read more
Number of words: 897 Soon after quick counts showed that Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo had won his second term, he announced that his government will move the country’s capital out of Jakarta. A few locations on the island of Kalimantan (formerly Borneo) are being considered, as they are centrally located in this vast archipelagic … Read more
Number of words: 428 Scientists have created the world’s smallest pixels, by trapping particles of light under tiny rocks of gold, that could be used for new types of large-scale flexible displays, big enough to cover entire buildings. The colour pixels, developed by scientists from the University of Cambridge in the UK, are compatible with … Read more
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