I first came across a second-hand copy of Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (1981) in a small pavement stall on College Street sometime in the mid-1980s when I was still an undergraduate...
He was the world’s foremost specialist in the biology of ants. But his mind and talent ranged far beyond insects. He was a profound thinker who developed major theories in ecology and evolution....
The persistence of severe mental disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or obsessive compulsive disorder through history and their uniform geographic prevalence across the world is what som...
For half a billion years or so, our ancestors sprouted tails. As fish, they used their tails to swim through the Cambrian seas. Much later, when they evolved into primates, their tails helped them sta...
The Central Board of Secondary Education has ‘rationalized’ the curriculum for the 10th and 12th standards, keeping in mind the loss of school hours for the last one and a half years due t...
Sukumar Ray may have got it wrong: whiskers — the gnof — may not have been the correct cipher for a shared solidarity. That honour, if New, Brave, Modern India is any indication,...
In a 1988 essay on pandemics, Joshua Lederberg, Nobel laureate and president of The Rockefeller University, US, reminded the medical community that when it comes to infectious disease, the laws of Dar...
False calmSir — Films like Aquaman and Mowgli may be visual treats, but they also lull viewers into a false sense of complacency. The clear blue waters of the oceans that the so-called “protector ...
If Arthur Conan Doyle had written The Hound of the Baskervilles in the twenty-first century — this adventure of Sherlock Holmes had been serialized at the turn of the twentieth — he would have bee...
Sir — A new book by Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, has been published posthumously. It has quickly garnered much appreciation. The book touches upon some controversial issues, ...