Khasi customs forbid tree-cutting in the law kyntang – the sacred groves and forests – and also disallow anyone from taking anything, even a leaf, out. At the root of it all is the Khasi pantheistic ...

As the COVID-19 outbreak in India swelled earlier this year, there were reports of people dumping the bodies of those who had succumbed to the disease in the river. A new book coauthored by the ...

Globally, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are beginning to receive the required attention. Once regarded as a “silent killer” of the rich, they have slowly started surpassing communicable diseases as ...

An illustration of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson in the December 1892 edition of The Adventure of the Silver Blaze. Source: Strand Magazine, public domain The mysterious root poison devil’s foot root ...

A wafer of a set of ‘quantum processors’ built by D-Wave Systems. Photo: jurvetson/Flickr, CC BY 2.0. We are in the middle of what the journal Nature has called the “quantum gold rush”. Governments ...

Quantum entanglement is still a subject of physics research but also a component of commercial technologies and plays a starring role in the quantum information processing industry. The 2022 Nobel ...

New Delhi: A recent study by the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature has found that the top 20% of high expenditure households in India generate nearly seven times the carbon emissions compared ...

If you care about the environment, you’ve heard about carbon calculators, the digital tools that allow people to calculate their carbon footprint – a measurement of how much carbon dioxide – ...

In Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), set in the Sunderbans, one of the protagonists, Kanai, recounts an unlikely but true story of a “lowly shipping inspector”, an “Ingrej shaheb” (‘English ...

Photo: snowpeak/Flickr, CC BY 2.0. Even on the fairest of days, without a single cloud in sight, an electric current flows from the sky to the ground. Driven by the difference in electrical potential ...

Snake oil has changed in reputation over several centuries from the tried and true to the dark and dangerous. Until the late 19th century, snake oil actually led a decidedly uncontroversial existence.

Featured image: Representative. Photo: ArtHouse Studio/Pexels. The media is overflowing with news on zoonosis, the medical term for diseases that are transmitted from animals to humans. Debates are ...