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Hindustan Times •

Innovation starts with empathy: A Wknd chat with teenaged innovator Gitanjali Rao

“What is lead,” Gitanjali Rao swallowed the last of her pasta and asked her parents. She was nine years old and had just heard about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, on the news. Children in parts of that city, not that far from her home in Lone Tree, Colorado, were drinking water contaminated with lead, and nothing was being done about it. Shouldn’t she at least try to help? By the age of 11, she had taken her first steps to do so, designing a home-test kit that could potentially analyse wa...
Hindustan Times •

There are always ways to resist: Wknd interviews dystopian author Laila Lalami

In Moroccan-American author Laila Lalami’s new novel, The Dream Hotel, pre-crime surveillance has stretched its tentacles into our sleeping brains. Lalami’s heroine, Sara Hussein, is a researcher with the Getty Museum and a busy mother of toddler twins. She is returning to the US from a work trip to London when she is detained at the airport and told that her dreams have raised her risk score too high. She is then transported to a “retention centre”.These centres are privately run and have been...
Nature •

How a bipolar diagnosis benefits my research

For neuroscientist Imtiaz Zafar, researching bipolar disorder is both a professional occupation and a lifelong study of an experienced reality. Zafar found his mind unravelling in psychosis, paranoia and depression during his doctorate. He is now a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS) in Bengaluru, India, where, almost a decade ago, he was a patient. He and his co-workers now investigate the effect of mood stabilizers and antipsychotics at the molecu...
Hindustan Times •

Claudia de Rham: “The notion of time is not absolute”

It was always clear in my mind. When I started writing the book, it became clear that there could never have been anything else. I think gravity is fun and almost teasing us, right? It’s always there all around us, and because we know it’s going to be something we can’t avoid, it pushes us to challenge it. We all like to play with it by dropping things and seeing if we can prevent them from falling.From the point of view of theoretical physics, what I like about it is its beautiful symmetry. It’...
Hindustan Times •

The X factor: An Indian has cracked the code to randomness in the virtual world

Roll the dice, and the outcome could be anything between one and six. Such randomness fills our world. Step into the binary reality of computers, though, and randomness becomes a rare resource, much sought after and largely unobtainable. In the structured world of software programs, even computers tasked with generating a random result end up following a pattern of some kind. The closest they can come to true randomness is something called pseudo-randomness, where the patterns aren’t easily visi...
Hindustan Times •

Master of disguise: Meet the inventor of a state-of-the-art invisibility cloak

In some ways, he is himself the stuff of science-fiction. For thousands of years, dating to ancient Greek and Welsh myths, then sci-fi and the worlds of HG Wells and Harry Potter, storytellers and scientists have toyed with the idea of the invisibility cloak. Wells, who foresaw the aircraft and army tank, atomic bomb and Wikipedia, wrote of a scientist committed to invisibility in The Invisible Man (1897). This scientist learnt how to change the way light reflected off his body.In Canada, George...
Hindustan Times •

Bug, MD: Meet the surgeons and doctors of the wild

Birds do it. Bees do it. Even hibernating bears do it. They self-medicate, and they do it better than us. Bears, for instance, eat willow bark after their long winter snooze. Rich in salicin, the bark helps cleanse the bear’s system and ease the stiffness and aches that may have set in, during the still winter months. Incidentally, salicylic acid drawn from salicin is used in our painkillers too; it’s helped us make aspirin since 1899. Now to more dramatic examples. Florida carpenter ants perfor...
Hindustan Times •

‘For us physicists, beauty is a new idea that unifies and explains’

It was the one about Satyendra Nath Bose, Einstein and a new theory on photon behaviour. “It was absolutely amazing to me that someone could, just from pure thought, sitting alone at the University of Dhaka, come up with something as fundamental as the concept of bosons, and send ripples through the world,” Jain says. That story marked the start of his love affair with physics. Jain is now 65 and a condensed-matter physicist at Pennsylvania State University. He recently won the 2025 Wolf Prize (...
Hindustan Times •

Jay Lemery: “Treating climate medicine as if it were a scam is horrible”

How do you tend to a farmer whose kidneys have shrivelled up as his body endured punishing heatwaves and lack of clean water, making him a lifelong patient? Or a young adult who comes in breathless with no history of asthma? Our brains may deny climate change, but our bodies know and show how climate change is altering us by way of disease. Climate change is no longer just about extreme disasters like wildfires, glaciers, or species extinction, but our bodies that labour for breath through the y...
Hindustan Times •

Vice in our veins: The science behind the sins that make us human

A new book by the English neurologist Dr Guy Leschziner suggests the reason we don’t evolve out of our “dark sides” is that they once helped us live on as a species. They were, in fact, so helpful that the fast-learning, fast-growing human brain became hard-wired for gluttony, envy, pride, wrath, greed, sloth and lust. In his book, Seven Deadly Sins: The Biology of Being Human (November; HarperCollins), Dr Leschziner, 50, studies brain scans, case studies, genetic findings and research papers fr...
https://www.hindustantimes.com/ •

Can your genes predict your future?

How far would you go to cheat death?

That question haunted 25-year-old Pooja Jhaveri. Her relatives on both sides had lived to an average age of 90. Jhaveri was in rude health herself. But what if there was a disease silently lurking inside her?

Thirteen years ago, a 13-year-long project to map the human genome was completed. The data has just begun to be interpreted, but scientists have found credible links between certain genes – like BRCA 1 and 2 – and diseases such as breast cancer.