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...

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...

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 (...

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...

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...

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.