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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.

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
consists of students, academicians, coders, designers and journalists.

~ STELLA DENVER

903 / “Pristine nature?”… Dump the idea!

Agriculture was the spadework (literally so) that not only anticipated but also necessitated the Industrial Revolution. It will be a fatal mistake, or wishful thinking at best, to conjecture that human societies before the Industrial Revolution had little effect on…

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000 / Experimental

PAGE FOR EXPERIMENTS IN POSTING art gallery is set to redefine cultural landscape. The revitalized art gallery is set to redefine cultural landscape. The revitalized art gallery is set to redefine cultural landscape. The revitalized art gallery is set to…

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913 / One metal through two ages

Iron replaced bronze as the prime material for tool and weapon production during the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. The replacement was gradual — at different times in different regions. There were things made of iron…

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959 / Social distancing was an apt lesson

Zebrafish are known for their pro-social behaviour, but around 10% of them are ‘loners’ who dismiss social cues. The brain activity of this minority differs from that of their pro-social siblings. At the same time, even typically social zebrafish avoid…

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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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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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208 / Information, just a small amount

Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran once remarked that people would never understand each other unless their language is reduced to half a dozen words. The truth is that often we need only that many words (a small amount of information) for…

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947 / Politics and a biometric bracelet

In a thought experiment of historian Yuval Noah Harari, a hypothetical government insists that every citizen should wear a biometric bracelet. This device monitors body temperature and heart-rate, 24 hours a day. The big data hoarded this way is analysed…

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