Tag: Health

In March this year, the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and the American Heart Association (AHA), both globally recognised premier organisations in cardiovascular medicine, handed down their newest dyslipidemia guideline, and gave universal Lipoprotein(a) screening in every adult a ‘Class I’ recommendation — the strongest tier there is. The High-Sensitivity C-Reactive Protein (hsCRP) test got...

In March this year, the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and the American Heart Association (AHA), both globally recognised premier organisations in cardiovascular medicine, handed down their newest dyslipidemia guideline, and gave universal Lipoprotein(a) screening in every adult a ‘Class I’ recommendation — the strongest tier there is. The High-Sensitivity C-Reactive Protein (hsCRP) test got...

Biotechnology, when I was a student in the early 1970s, was test tubes, pipettes, culture plates and microscopes. Today, however, biotechnology is no longer just a laboratory discipline. It is a platform for technologies that power healthcare, agriculture, industrial manufacturing and environmental solutions. Biotechnology today is an integrated inter and multi-disciplinary science where biology has...

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...