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Hindustan Times •

Laura Spinney: “Widespread literacy has slowed down language evolution”

As I started talking to linguists, archaeologists and geneticists, I realised they were all providing different pieces of the same puzzle. Most people agree that these languages trace back to a single common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European. But because it predated writing, people naturally asked: Who spoke this first language? Where did they live? How did they live?In summer 2022, a linguist mentioned the origin story of the Indo-European languages and how research in the field was racing ahead. I...
Hindustan Times •

Are you there yet?: Decoding the new maths of adulthood

* Galileo was 19 when he made some of his most dramatic discoveries about the density of matter.* Newton was 23 when he had his Eureka moment about gravity.* Mozart was touring Europe and performing before royalty by the age of six.These were prodigies, certainly. But given how low life expectancy was until the modern era, researchers now believe that a large share of humanity’s most dramatic discoveries—harnessing fire, the wheel, smelting, and plenty more — were likely made by people who were...
Hindustan Times •

Mine craft: Inside the rush for in-space manufacturing

Let’s take those questions one at a time.For years, space, by which we mean the International Space Station (ISS) and other manned laboratories in Low Earth Orbit, has been largely a place of small-scale experiments (on animals ranging from mice and fish to bacteria), and attempts at off- world agriculture and air and water recycling, much of it focused on eventual inter-planetary travel.But as the ISS era draws to a close(check out the Wknd special on how this global effort is being decommissio...
Nature •

I encourage women to claim their space in astrophysics and beyond

Theoretical astrophysicist Debarati Chatterjee has always seen gender for what it is — a social construct. Despite witnessing domestic violence as a child, experiencing sexual harassment as an undergraduate and a PhD student, and being one of the small proportion (around 20%) of astronomers in the world who are women, she hasn’t let her gender define her career. Leaving her home country of India to start a postdoctoral position in Germany in 2010, she saw that prejudices based on race, class and...
UpBeat •

AI In Reproductive Health: Can Chatbots Promote Safe Abortions Among Rural Indian Women?

“In 2020, when Covid-19 hit, our youth leaders – who educate young people, especially women on sexual and reproductive health (SRH) – had to pause their routine visits to the villages. We started receiving phone calls, sometimes frantic ones, asking for guidance, especially on safe abortion practices. That’s when we thought – why not a chatbot,”’ says Anisha Aggarwal, senior director, strategy and development, Ipas Development Foundation (IDF). Since 2001, IDF has been working with national and...
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...
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.