Filter

A digital payments revolution in India

Take a walk on Mumbai’s Juhu beach and little has changed in five years—except for the QR codes adorning every food stall. Go to São Paulo in Brazil, Beijing in China, or many other cities across the emerging world and you find something similar.

15/05/2023

“The” human genome was always a misnomer

The human Genome Project, which published its results 20 years ago last month, was a landmark in biology. It was also somewhat misleadingly named. After all, there is no such thing as “the” human genome.

10/05/2023

How to bring scents to the metaverse

It was one of those many inventions that never quite took off. In 1960, audiences watching the film “Scent of Mystery” got to experience the wonders of “Smell-O-Vision”. Mounted under the cinema seats, the system pumped out 30 different scents—from…

10/05/2023

What shipwrecked insects reveal about life at sea in the 17th century

A great deal of romance attaches these days to the “Age of Sail”, the period between the 15th and 19th centuries when wooden sailing ships reached their technological apogee. Historians, however, have a less rosy view.

03/05/2023

Much of the Earth remains unexplored

“Earth” has always been an odd choice of name for the third planet from the Sun. After all, an alien examining it through a telescope would note that two-thirds of its surface is covered not by earth at all, but by oceans of water.

03/05/2023

After half a century, there is a commercial market for Moon missions

“THE MOON is a Harsh Mistress”, by Robert Heinlein, was not just the most influential novel about the Moon published in the 20th century. It was also the one with the raciest title. In the body of the book, though, the Moon’s role is less…

26/04/2023

Too many people take too many pills

As a pharmacist in a big hospital in Adelaide, Emily Reeve would often see patients overwhelmed by the number of drugs they took each day. “They’d say ‘I take so many medicines that I rattle when I walk’,” she recalls.

26/04/2023