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Scientists in the US have developed a calculator from living cells, using old-fashioned analog programming. Their hope is that the technology could be used in the future to program cells to kill cancer. Researchers have previously built electronic circuits using living cells. They achieved this by forcing living cells to behave in binary (digital) systems. But this is not energy efficient. And many cells are required to implement simple functions that transistors, the basic units of electronic circuits which are... Read more
Nearly three-fourths of all diseases caused in India are due to water contaminants. Despite that, one in eight Indians still lacks access to clean drinking water. The poor now realise that paying for clean water can save much more in health-care costs later. It was this market that Sarvajal, a social enterprise in India, wanted to cater to. Founded in 2008, Sarvajal—which in Sanskrit means “water for all”—now sells clean drinking water to more than 70,000 people in rural India.... Read more
In 1948 Angus John Bateman, an English geneticist, proposed that females invest more in producing and caring for their offspring than males because sperm are cheaper than eggs. Since then, however, many species, in particular egg-laying ones, have been found to violate what became known as Bateman's principle. Such role reversal has left evolutionary biologists baffled. Some suggeseted that species in which females lay eggs that are big compared to their bodies may need more time to recover after laying... Read more
On March 29th I wrote an Op-Ed in The Hindu, a national newspaper in India, on the Indian government's plans to hand out $35 tablets to poor students. It attracted a number of comments and emails. I'm writing this post as a response to some of the common points that they raise. 1. Are test scores the best way to evaluate student's learning? The studies I quote (references to which can be found here) also took into consideration other factors. For... Read more
The Indian government needs to open its eyes and realise that the technological utopia it envisions in the low-cost tablet is no cure for poor education, poverty or inequality The last few days have brought the Aakash tablet back into the media limelight. Last Friday, Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister M.M. Pallam Raju said that troubles with the manufacturer could doom the project. But the next day, former HRD Minister Kapil Sibal, who started the project, denied Mr. Raju’s comments.... Read more
Clouds turn to rain when water droplets and ice crystals that make them up get too big to resist the pull of Earth’s gravity. This is often caused by particles that disturb the maelstrom of droplets and crystals to become seeds around which cloud matter coalesces. Once this happens, the seeds grow rapidly and eventually fall to the ground. The seeds can be caused by the passage of exotic things like cosmic rays. More often, though, they are dust particles... Read more
Written with Alex Flint Beyond all the needs that it fulfils, all technological innovation is underpinned by a common driving force: how to make information flow more efficiently. From when the first modern humans walked the earth, we’ve assumed that it was their survival instinct that drove innovation. It certainly has, but we forget that without the ability to efficiently pass on information from one generation to the next, our ancestors would’ve had to reinvent the most basic things every time they... Read more
A newly discovered virus may be the most abundant organism on the planet What is the commonest living thing on Earth? Until now, those in the know would probably have answered Pelagibacter ubique, the most successful member of a group of bacteria, called SAR11, that jointly constitute about a third of the single-celled organisms in the ocean. But this is not P. ubique’s only claim to fame, for unlike almost every other known cellular creature, it and its relatives have seemed to... Read more
Exploding research costs and falling sales: there seems to be no cure for the pharma industry’s two big afflictions. But it may have found a way to both cut costs and open up new markets: repurposing drugs already approved for treatment of one disease or those that failed to gain approval in the late stages of development. Alas, this is not as easy as it sounds—mostly for legal reasons. Finding new uses for old or failed drugs is on average... Read more
An editor at The Economist once remarked, as advice to me on how to write: “Aim to write a piece that gets featured on The Browser.” Edited by Robert Cottrell, The Browser is a website that recommends only five to six articles everyday, which it considers are the best of all that is published on the web that day. Cottrell, who spends every possible hour of the day reading new content on the web, has written an article in the Financial Times that has some important lessons for young writers... Read more
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