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research

The Constant Writer

Vaibhav Vats

Ramachandra Guha on the thrills of research, the insecurity of academics and their love of jargon, and why he doesn’t take holidays

Gulp! They were Big

Elephants need to eat for 18 hours a day. Large dinosaurs would need to have eaten for 30 hours a day. How then did they manage to get so big?

Sleep on It

Dreams of a task being learnt improve performance, suggesting that they may be by-products of memory processing.

“We can’t disable our hidden brain”

Author Shankar Vedantam on the mental prejudice-graph which kicks in as early as age three, how it influences stock markets and why it turns some into suicide bombers.

Maths of Moviemaking

Hollywood films increasingly use shot lengths of a particular pattern that best holds our attention.

Fundamental Forces and Chopping Wood

From Newton to Einstein, understanding gravity has been the holy grail of physics. Professor T Padmanabhan of the Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, spoke to Open of the work for which he was awarded the 2009 Infosys Prize for the Physical Sciences.

In Search of the Smell of Rain

A group of art students learnt synthetic biology to make bacteria produce the smell of rain in a lab. They almost succeeded.

Walking in Circles

Research says people cannot walk in a straight line if they do not have absolute references

The DNA of Sleep

Scientists have discovered the first gene involved in regulating the optimal length of human sleep

Hidden Portals

Platform 9¾ from the Potter books may still elude us Muggles, but scientists are working on a circuitous route that may yet get us there

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