Henrietta Lacks was just 31 years old when she passed away in October of 1951, succumbing to a short battle with cervical cancer. A poor, African-American tobacco farmer, her life and death was a quiet affair, perhaps most felt by her five young children and the widower she left behind.

The name ‘retrovirus’ raises more questions than provide answers. The term ‘retro’ reminds us of disco balls, bouffant hairstyles and polka dots. However, a retrovirus is not merely a virus with questionable fashion sense! It is a virus belonging to a family of single-stranded RNA viruses.

Have you noticed the smell of the air just after a rain - the fresh earthy smell that take us back to our childhood, that inspired a lots of poets and writers to flourish with their creativity?

Neutrinos are the elusive sub-atomic particles in the Universe. They are abundant throughout the universe and tens of thousands pass through our body every second!

Most of us have seen diabetics take insulin injections. Wasim Akram was an insulin dependent diabetic, and at the same time, a threatening fast bowler.

Insulin is a protein produced in our bodies by the pancreas. In earlier days, insulin was extracted from the pancreas of cattle, in a tedious process that yielded just a few micrograms per pancreas.

Growing up in the USA, ten-year-old Steven was asked in school to read aloud a passage from a newspaper. The article described the opening of the first Disneyland. However, all the poor boy could see on the paper was this—“In a grand ceremony  Disneyland opened in California to delirious applause.” Steven Spielberg did not know it at the time—and indeed until he was formally diagnosed several years later—that he was dyslexic.

If you were a travelling salesman, who travels to many places selling something, the most challenging part of the job is to find the shortest route to these places without visiting any of them twice. But, did you know many birds, animals and even insects like bees solve a similar problem in their daily lives while searching for food?

Anyone who has ever had a relative in a hospital or watched any form of medical drama will have heard of 'ECG'. Come to think of it, almost everybody has.  An ECG or an electrocardiogram checks if your heart is working properly by measuring the electric current it generates as it beats.

In 1908, a meteoroid (a small asteroid) exploded in the atmosphere near the Stony Tunguska River in Eastern Siberia, flattening over 2000 square kilometres of forest. Luckily, the region was very thinly populated, and there were no casualties. But, our Earth is not always that fortunate! Billions of years ago, our planet is thought to have been struck by many such asteroids, creating a dent on its surface.

Imagine streaming a movie through your tube light or accessing the Internet through a street lamp. Light Fidelity (Li-Fi), a new communication system developed by Professor Harald Hass, can actually achieve this!