Plastic: How it became the ‘lubricant of globalisation’

As countries agree to forge an international, legally non-binding treaty to end plastic pollution, a walk down memory land about the rise of the …

Why we need a new lens to clear the air

Science may have become our only crutch against bad air, but it is time we invented a new politics of space that privileges the walker and the cyclist

Breaking the mould

Microbes will always triumph over antibiotics. We can only choose the battles that will make a difference

Making sense of sexual swings

Is your sexual preference only a result of your genes or do environment and culture also influence it?

Debased database

Statistical data has been used and abused for centuries by a range of people for a variety of reasons. Is there a way out?

The brew of `post-truth'

Popular opinion can now be engineered using fake news grapevines spawned by new technologies. Here's how

Overwhelmingly WEIRD!

The edifice of Western science is built on generalisation, where homogeneity has replaced diversity

The joker among 'trumps'!

Logging trees to generate power is emerging as the new game to gain carbon credits. But this climate strategy is burning the ecology

Wannabe Noahs

Scientists are trying to bring back extinct animals from the dead, throwing open the Pandora's box

Chimeras of afterlife

A growing number of the elite are freezing their bodies in the hope for a rebirth. Is it possible?

Bet your brain

The market is flooded with brain boosters, even though there is little evidence to show for it

Uncanny truth about germs

Building immunity may be a matter of keeping company with microbes, argue some immunologists

No consensus on consciousness

Despite fanciful theories by psychologists, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists, consciousness remains an abiding mystery

The twin sword of technology

Engineering solutions like carbon capture and storage create risks that necessitate even more ingenious fixes

Making sex count

In the annals of modern medicine, medical research experiments have always been sexist. The tide is finally turning

Undetected infiltration

Pharmaceutical drugs that we consume are travelling through our pee and poo and contaminating water sources

The great science robbery

A Kazakh neuroscientist triggers the 'who owns public-funded science' debate by taking on a publishing giant

Call the bluff

The JNU episode must force us to decipher the modus operandi of the modern `truth-telling' information machinery

Unbuttoning the gender straitjacket

Attempts at subverting the delusions of gender should begin with a progressive fashioning of young minds

The blind spot of science

Will scientists ever concede that science and politics are bedfellows, no matter how strange?

Delivering business

What the increase in caesarean operations worldwide tells us about the science and politics of birthing

Secret life of plants

A new book reinforces the fact that plants have intelligence and a complex sensory network

Is anyone out there?

The Hawking-Milner initiative promises to offer the quest for alien intelligence a new lease of life

Putting faith back in science

Pope Francis may have just succeeded in creating a kind of middle ground, albeit a slippery one

The labyrinth of desire

A female equivalent of Viagra has once again rekindled our interest in the female libido