Tag: Health

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)...

Priya walks into an orthopedician’s clinic with knee pain that she says she has had for three months. The doctor spends eight minutes with her, orders an MRI, and asks her to come back with the images. MRI shows signs of early osteoarthritis. The doctor lists three options: injections, physiotherapy or wait and watch. Priya...

A six-year-old girl in China died in March 2025 after receiving what researchers said they believed was the world’s first base-editing therapy directed at the brain, according to an investigation by Science and Retraction Watch. The investigation has raised important questions about the oversight of an experimental personalised gene-editing trial and the way the researchers...

A five-year-old sat with a talking AI-powered stuffed animal, as part of a University of Cambridge study. At one point, the child told the toy, “I love you.” The toy politely replied, “Kindly ensure interactions adhere to the guidelines provided”. I am a behavioural scientist, and for over 10 years, I have been studying how...