Tag: Health

Not long ago, a diagnosis of advanced cancer left doctors with little more than symptom control and hope. Over the course of a few of decades, however, that picture changed dramatically. Chemotherapy delivered the first meaningful survival gains, though at a steep cost in side effects, a cost later softened by a new generation of...

Ask a sixteen-year-old about a social media ban, and you get an answer sharper than most adults arguing about bans. She says, “It doesn’t prepare us for the real world when we will have to deal with these distractions in our life”. The teenager’s response strikes at the core of the ban vs. no ban debate: the...

Anyone waiting for municipal approval of a building plan may wonder why a local body should regulate construction on private land. In the Madras Presidency, such powers were formalised under the Madras City Municipal Corporation Act, 1919. After Independence, the first Conference of State Ministers on Town and Country Planning in 1960 gave impetus to...

Globally, more than one in 10 adults now live with diabetes. If you have South Asian roots, that risk is even higher, and it hits earlier than it does in many other populations. In India alone, the number of people with diabetes is projected to reach 125 million by 2045.  Yet, when scientists try to...

Was it meat or glucose that fueled the growth of the human brain? If evolutionary science told us, hitherto, that human brain expansion relied on meat to grow, a new study has an interesting addition to this theory. Published in a recent issue of Science, the study posits a dual fuel strategy – sugar and...

The computer did not create a virus. It did not touch a test tube or handle a living cell. What it did may ultimately be more consequential: it helped decide what the virus’s genome should be. Researchers at Stanford University and the Arc Institute used artificial intelligence (AI) to design complete genomes of bacteriophages –...

Some people can live apparently ordinary lives even when both copies of a gene (one inherited from the mother and the other from the father) have stopped working. Until their DNA is sequenced, they may never know that this has happened. A large study from Pakistan, published in Nature (June 2026), has now identified such...

GUWAHATI Researchers across two continents may have given an iron-and-zinc boost for India’s Millets Mission, launched as a concept in 2007 and taken forward a decade later. Nutrition and health specialists in India and the U.S. conducted a nine-month study among toddlers in Mumbai’s urban slums. They found that iron- and zinc-fortified pearl millets fed...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved Moderna’s flu vaccine for people aged 50 and older, the company said ​on Wednesday (August 5, 2026), marking the first approval of a messenger RNA-based vaccine for seasonal ‌flu. The shot, mFlusiva, was given a traditional approval for adults ​aged 50 to 64, and an accelerated approval...

Despite decades of research, Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) still remains one of the deadliest types of brain cancers. While treatments including surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy exist and have improved over time, the outcomes for patients remain generally poor. One of the major obstacles to treatment lies in the brain’s natural protection – the blood-brain barrier (BBB)...