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

~ STELLA DENVER

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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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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924 / AI: The genie is out of the bottle

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will have covered most of the skills and qualities that the present youth devotedly regards as keys to success in the future. The first wave of AI replaced humans in physically repetitive tasks. That shift gave rise…

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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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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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