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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

935 / Saving elephants to save eggplants

Both historical documents and genetic data agree upon that the eggplant, better known as brinjal in Indian kitchens and cookery books, was first domesticated somewhere in the region of China and India. Surprisingly, many wild relatives of the presently cultivated…

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965 / A plunge in human-made noise

COVID-19 couldn’t have silenced the mobile Towers of Babel, but it did stop the stampeding humanity in its tracks. The global effect of physical distancing (it isn’t social distancing) and the stoppage of services, idustries and collective movements marked the…

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214 / Flight noise: stall and the sonic fix

While Indians hold the simplistic notion of democracy as anybody’s right to use ear-damaging crackers and amplifiers anywhere any time, civilised people take a different view. One harsh criticism against the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration, the US body regulating civil…

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955 / Penguins can teach us one trick

Imagine a place where the air temperature can drop to minus forty (-40) Celsius and the winds can bolt atspeeds of 40 meters per second? Antarctic penguins live in a place that exactly fits the description. They routinely hop in…

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209 / Could Godzilla have been possible?

Godzilla pops up in the Big Apple after viciously handling some ships and leaving a few imposing footprints on tropical islands. It stops by Madison Square Garden, stops to visit the Chrysler Building, goes on a walk through Central Park,…

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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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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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178 / Comic strips aren’t ‘Hokum’

The theme of radiation is at the core of the comic strip dynamics. Marvel comics’ Incredible Hulk, a green-skinned monster, was born when a scientist accidentally irradiated himself while handling his own “gamma bomb”. The X-Men’s awesome powers come from…

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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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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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