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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

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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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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932 / Immune system and human lifespan

The human immune system has always been evolving and it is still evolving, but lifespan continues to increase with each generation. In addition, lifestyles and ecologic natures can really differ and influence immune responses. A malaria parasite has infected Africans…

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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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960 / Uncertainty as part of all research

One of the most prominent theories in modern science is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Bertrand Russell said there is nothing uncertain about it, but let it pass. The point is uncertainty is a natural part of all scientific research. At the…

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949 / Beyond vision: opsins that taste

New research has it that evolution is a tinkerer, not an engineer. It echoes what Nobel laureate François Jacob famously declared in 1977: “Evolution does not produce novelties from scratch. It works with what already exists.”  A team of scientists…

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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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950 / Real-world systems evolve always

Biological, social and economic schemes are some of the real-world systems we are most familiar with. These systems evolve all the time. And the dynamics of all such systems have one trait. They show markedly augmented levels of activity over…

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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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908 / It is a spooky world for a horse

Horses have both binocular vision and monocular vision. Binocular vision is used when their eyes and ears are focused on something in front of them. And monocular vision is used when they use each eye separately to watch movements —…

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