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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

931 / Scanning for signals on a face

Are her eyes narrowed or widened? Is his mouth turned up or down? We habitually scan for such apparent signals when we look for reliable clues leading to the emotional stance or shifts of other people. In reality, facial features…

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944 / An extreme dam for the days ahead

Sometimes we need extreme measures to keep things at bay. And right now the world needs a “North-European Enclosure Dam” (NEED) to protect more than 25 million Europeans against the ravages of an expected sea-level rise of several metres over…

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938 / Leftward errors in line bisections

Many things we aren’t aware of can unconsciously influence our behavioural inclinations and orientations. “Pseudoneglect” is one of those things. Experimental evidence recognises it as a mild asymmetry in spatial attention. One result is leftward errors in line bisections. Even…

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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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945 / Forecasting the spread of anything

These days we hear a lot about people affected by COVID-19 and also about people arrested for spreading misinformation on the disease. Just two related topics? When experts try to forecast the spread of anything across populations (anything from COVID-19…

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961 / Can ignorance be traced to a source?

Students mute their ignorance and answer questions correctly in an exam, without their ignorance being detected by teachers. Is this a possible scenario? Yes, but only in the quantum world. UQ physicist Jacqui Romero has come up with the technique….

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936 / Skeletons lined up for the future

The term ‘Anthropocene’ is intended to refer to a period in Earth’s history marked by overwhelmingly evident geological processes exclusively triggered by humans. Palaeobiologist Jan Zalasiewicz identified broiler chickens as a new form of animal that has the potential to…

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