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

~ STELLA DENVER

901 / Ooh! Woohoo! Oops! — Vocal bursts

Ooh! That is  surprise. We make spontaneous sounds to express everything from elation (Woohoo!) to embarrassment (Oops!). A statistical analysis of responses to more than 2,000 “vocal bursts” (nonverbal exclamations) conveys at least 24 kinds of emotion. An audio map…

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179 / Language: The peak innovation?

It was Eors Szathmary who likened language to an amoeba, and the human brain to the habitat in which it can thrive. The Hungarian scientist’s explanation for his choice of simile is that “a surprisingly large part of our brain…

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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Both historical documents and genetic data agree upon that the eggplant, better known as brinjal in Indian kitchens and cookery books, was first domesticated somewhere in the region of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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963 / Running Nineteen, with no hugs

The year 2020 would go into history as the “no hugs” year — a year in which people were forced to limit the opportunities for physical contact, so as to protect themselves. There is a paradox in it because physical…

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940 / A theme of death and celebration

Alcohol and tobacco don’t have the prerogative to generate diseases readily associated with drinking and smoking. At the same time, disgusting graphics employed in antismoking campaigns often backfire, as they ignite the rebellious traits in youngsters. But we know smoking…

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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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965 / A drop in human-caused 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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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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