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The source material we try to curate is ‘Zebra Crossing’ — a Sunday column carried by The Indian Express for twenty years (2000-2020).

All along a continuum of global cohesion

Call us Team ZC. We have members from India (where our project took off), China, and Pakistan. And, extending to the farthest geographical point on the Earth’s surface from India, Team ZC even has a member from Chile—nearly 17,000 kilometers or 10,500 miles away. This is just a tangential indication of how truly global we are, thanks to our lively presence and interactions on ResearchGate (RG), a social networking site with over 20 million researchers. The first person to sign up at our former site, covid19on.com, was a Karachi-based researcher from RG. The pandemic united us as it disregarded all national boundaries. Covid19on.com was launched in December 2019—months before governments worldwide began announcing lockdowns one after another. Back then, most Team ZC members were part of TEAM 19. These two teams can be viewed along a continuum of global cohesion or synergic cohesion, as we are engaged in a project to curate hundreds of print media articles. The section “Notes From The Backend” will brief you on how we go about it.

A shortcut across the information highway

The column Zebra Crossing was concieved as a shortcut across the information highway — at a time when dial-up was the only internet option, even for privileged users in first-tier firms. Right now, a host of ResearchGate (RG) scholars contend that the column holds an encyclopedic scope — a finding substantiated by AI briefs.

Our team
includes students, academicians, coders, designers and journalists.

~ STELLA DENVER

180 / Diamonds cooked in a micro oven

Back in 1971, the James Bond movie title ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ wouldn’t have struck anyone as especially remarkable. The well-known phrase just looked proper for a film in which Agent 007 probes into the disappearance of certain diamonds in transit….

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948 / From fish to four-limbed animals

Tetrapods are four-limbed animals. Therefore the discovery of a “tetrapod-like” fish called Elpistostege is intriguing. The nearly complete fossil specimen says a lot about one of the most significant events in the history of life — the evolution of fishes…

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958 / Same shape for the same purpose

If you unearth an artefact with the same shape and used for the same purpose in two or more differentregions, it could be the bespoke result of cultural diffusion — but not necessarily. Archaeologist Sue O’Connor studied five fish hooks…

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914 / Mona Lisa: Not a Duchenne smile!

One bizarre remark on Mona Lisa’s smile is that she doesn’t smile at all; it’s a visual illusion. And wasn’t Leonardo da Vinci a master in optics? Turns out, half of the claim is true — literally! Neurologists Lucia Ricciardi…

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178 / Comic strips aren’t ‘Hokum’

The theme of radiation is at the core of the comic strip dynamics. Marvel comics’ Incredible Hulk, a green-skinned monster, was born when a scientist accidentally irradiated himself while handling his own “gamma bomb”. The X-Men’s awesome powers come from…

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916 / Anything evolved is here to stay

The oddest thing about stress is that people are likely to feel stressed about being stressed. Stress happens when we are stretched beyond the elasticity of our mind– when we push ourselves or are pushed by circumstances to operate at…

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907 / Better scream; do not speak!

People can express emotions, such as happiness or sadness or anger, in two ways — through mere sounds (vocalisation) or through words (language). Does the brain respond to these two modes of emotional expressions with the same speed and equal…

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919 / It wasn’t fish, it was mammoth

Around 43,000 years ago, the first frontmen of Homo sapiens colonised Europe. They replaced the Neanderthals in the region approximately 3,000 years later — violently, per French palaeontologist Marcellin Boule (the first person to analyse a Neanderthal). One hypothesis about…

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