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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

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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957 / Phonemes bond with emotions

If you are too slow in catching a bird, you may get another chance; but if you are too slow in avoiding a deadly snake, it would be fatal. Avoiding dangers is more urgent than winning rewards in the strategy…

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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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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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905 / Drops that jump off surfaces

A condenser turns a substance from its gaseous state to its liquid state — by cooling it. Historically, condensers were always oriented vertically so as to allow water to drain by gravity. But then, about five years ago, Virginia Tech…

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