Author: Anjali Yennemadi

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lays a small unrewarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” While Douglas Adams penned this line in his ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, he mentioned a pretty insignificant sounding phrase: little blue green planet. Without a doubt, he refers to the Earth. Also Read: Bringing Back Space Culture…

Ever felt someone watching you from behind? Ever experienced gut feelings so strong they end up coming true? Can we perceive the future before it actually happens? Most researchers term this feeling or pre-knowledge of an occurrence as the ‘Sixth Sense’. Premonition, they call it. In order to better elucidate the concept, it is necessary to delve into the depths of the mind, and try to better understand a mystery that has only just begun to baffle us all. The key point to understanding the sixth sense is to first understand more about the conscious and subconscious mind. The Concept of…

Ideally, a human being is born with 5 senses – sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste. These five senses enable us to perceive several actions, stimuli, changes and happenings around him and react to it. The senses are almost always combined to produce integrated responses. However, since the late 1800s, if not earlier still, researchers and scientists have questioned the distinct possibility of the existence of a sixth sense. While this theory has received widespread skepticism, there have been certain events that have supported the theory. Scientists call this ‘sixth sense’, or more technically – Extrasensory Perception (ESP). What is ESP? Extrasensory…

The concept of death has always been considered as sad and unfortunate. However, almost every culture, community and religion on this planet assumes (and accepts) the concept of a realm to which the dead transcend to. Could our perception of death be changed then, simply by reinventing one object, the coffin? Designers Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel have invented a novel, beautiful, as well as eco-friendly method that has revolutionised the idea of death– not as the end of life, but as the beginning of a return path in the biological cycle of life. Also Read: Will Google Cure Death? Capsula…

Over the course of the last decade and a half, the planet has been engulfed in several viral epidemics. The most distinct and wide-spread ones have been SARS, HIV-AIDS, H1N1, avian influenza (bird flu) and Ebola among other, more common viral diseases. The most recent virus to affect the population on a global scale is now Zika What is Zika? ‘Zika’ or ‘Zika fever’ is a disease caused by, you guessed it – the Zika virus. This virus is a member of the Flavivirus genus, related to dengue, yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis and West Nile disease causing viruses. The primary host of the Zika…

Proteins, carbohydrates, fats, water, vitamins and minerals. These are the general categories of biomolecules that your body is made up of. One thing that’s common to almost all, if not literally all of these, is a certain element. If you thought of Carbon, think again. There’s another – Oxygen. Each of the biomolecules I mentioned has varying degrees of oxygen in it, whether attached directly or indirectly to the molecule or ion, without which it would not exist. In this context, it is rather obvious that oxygen is super essential to life itself. Did I forget to mention it’s what we…