Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed in a drone strike in 2016

Though hospitals have resorted to e-consultations, the increased burden to create capacity to deal with the Covid-19 situation has resulted in huge losses.

Resident doctors, MBBS students and those serving their bond are at the frontline in the fight against Covid-19 in the city as senior clinicians stay away from their duty, leaving the young team of medical professionals firefighting the crisis on their own.

Hayden Library - PT2682.A87 P6713 2013

Hayden Library - PT2603.E455 A2 2016

Dewey Library - PT2673.E577 H3813 2019

Celebrating crystallography's centennial; how climate pushes malaria uphill; roundup of daily news with David Grimm.

Marcus Knudson discusses making metallic hydrogen and how it can better our understanding of gas giant planets and David Grimm brings online news stories about kid justice, part-time dieting, and bird brains. Hosted by Sarah Crespi. [Img: NASA/ESA]

Online news editor David Grimm shares stories on confessions extracted from sleepy people, malaria hiding out in deer, and making squishable bots based on cockroaches.   Corinne Simonti joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss whether Neandertal DNA in the human genome is helping or hurting. Read the related research in Science.   [Image: Tom Libby, Kaushik Jayaram and Pauline Jennings. Courtesy of PolyPEDAL Lab UC Berkeley.]

Online News Editor David Grimm shares stories on underground rings built by Neandertals, worldwide increases in cephalopods and a controversial hypothesis for Alzheimer’s disease.   Glen Weyl joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss academics’ role in rising markets that depend on data and networks of people. We’re lucky to live in the age of the match—need a ride, a song, a husband? There’s an app that can match your needs to the object of your desire, with some margin of error. But much of this innovation is happening in the private sector—what is academia doing to contribute?   [Music: Jeffrey Cook; Image: Etienne Fabre / SSAC]

News stories on bees that live perilously close to the mouth of a volcano, diagnosing arthritis in dinosaur bones, and the evolution of the female orgasm, with David Grimm.  From the magazine Rivers deliver water to the ocean but water is also discharged along the coast in a much more diffuse way. This “submarine groundwater discharge” carries dissolved chemicals out to sea. But the underground nature of these outflows makes them difficult to quantify.  Audrey Sawyer talks with Sarah Crespi about the scale of this discharge and how it affects coastal waters surrounding the United States.  [Image: Hilary Erenler/Music: Jeffrey Cook]

This week, we chat about what talking monkeys would sound like, a surprising virus detected in ancient pottery, and six cloned horses that helped win a big polo match with Online News Editor David Grimm. Plus, Science’s Alexa Billow talks to news writer Lizzie Wade about what forensic anthropologists can do to help parent groups find missing family members in Mexico.   Listen to previous podcasts.   [Image: (c) Félix Márquez; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

This week, we chat about what it means if a monkey can learn to recognize itself in a mirror, injecting people with live malaria parasites as a vaccine strategy, and insect-inspired wind turbines with Online News Editor David Grimm. And Joleah Lamb joins Alexa Billow to discuss how seagrass can greatly reduce harmful microbes in the ocean—protecting people and corals from disease. Read the research.   Listen to previous podcasts.   [Image: peters99/iStock; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

This week, we discuss the most accurate digital model of a human face to date, stray Wi-Fi signals that can be used to spy on a closed room, and artificial intelligence that can predict Supreme Court decisions with Online News Editor Catherine Matacic. Caroline Hartley joins Sarah Crespi to discuss a scan that can detect pain in babies—a useful tool when they can’t tell you whether something really hurts. Listen to previous podcasts. See more book segments.

This week we hear stories on what to do with experimental brain implants after a study is over, how gene therapy gave a second skin to a boy with a rare epidermal disease, and how bone markings thought to be evidence for early hominid tool use may have been crocodile bites instead, with Online News Editor Catherine Matacic. Sarah Crespi interviews Gary King about his new experiment to bring fresh data to the age-old question of how the news media influences the public. Are journalists setting the agenda or following the crowd? How can you know if a news story makes a ripple in a sea of online information? In a powerful study, King’s group was able to publish randomized stories on 48 small and medium sized news sites in the United States and then track the results.  Listen to previous podcasts. [Image: Chad Sparkes/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

We talk about the techniques of painting sleuths, how to combat alternative facts or “fake news,” and using audio signposts to keep birds from flying into buildings. For this segment, David Grimm—online news editor for Science—talks with host Sarah Crespi as part of a live podcast event from the AAAS Annual Meeting in Austin. Sarah also interviews Science News Editor Tim Appenzeller about Neandertal art. The unexpected age of some European cave paintings is causing experts to rethink the mental capabilities of our extinct cousins. For the monthly books segment, Jen Golbeck interviews with William Glassley about his book, A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice. Listen to previous podcasts. [Image: Marcus Trienke/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

A millennium ago, Viking navigators may have used crystals known as “sunstones” to navigate between Norway and Greenland. Sarah Crespi talks with Online News Editor David Grimm about how one might use a crystal to figure out where they are. Sarah also interviews freelancer Danna Staaf about her piece on sedating cephalopods. Until recently, researchers working with octopuses and squids faced the dilemma of not knowing whether the animals were truly sedated or whether only their ability to respond had been suppressed. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Listen to previous podcasts. [Image:  Nicholas Roerich, Guests from Overseas; Music: Jeffrey Cook]   

Researchers have found new clues to how the “talking drums” of one Amazonian tribe convey their messages. Sarah Crespi talks with Online News Editor Catherine Matacic about the role of tone and rhythm in this form of communication. Getting poked with a needle will probably get you moving. Apparently, it also gets charges moving in certain semiconductive materials. Sarah interviews Marin Alexe of The University of Warwick in Coventry, U.K., about this newfound flexo-photovoltaic effect. Alexe’s group found that prodding or denting certain semiconductors with tiny needles causes them to suddenly produce current in response to light. That discovery could enhance the efficiency of current of solar cell technologies. Finally, in our books segment, Jen Golbeck interviews Lucy Cooke about her new book The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Listen to previous podcasts. [Image: Adam Levine/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

To study the biological differences brought on by space travel, NASA sent one twin into space and kept another on Earth in 2015. Now, researchers from that project are trying to replicate that work planet-side to see whether the differences in gene expression were due to extreme stress or were specific to being in space. Sarah Crespi talks with Online News Editor Catherine Matacic about a “control” study using what might be a comparably stressful experience here on Earth: climbing Mount Everest. Catherine also shares a recent study that confirmed what one reddit user posted 5 years ago: A single path stretching from southern Pakistan to northeastern Russia will take you on the longest straight-line journey on Earth, via the ocean. Finally, Sarah talks with Roland Kröger of the University of York in the United Kingdom about his group’s study published this week in Science. Using a combination of techniques usually reserved for materials science, the group explored the nanoscale arrangement of mineral in bone, looking for an explanation of the tissue’s contradictory combination of toughness and hardness. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Listen to previous podcasts. [Image: Human bone (20X) by Berkshire Community College Bioscience Image Library; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Astronomers have been able to detect supermassive black holes and teeny-weeny black holes but the midsize ones have been elusive. Now, researchers have scanned through archives looking for middle-size galaxies and found traces of these missing middlers. Host Sarah Crespi and Staff Writer Daniel Clery discuss why they were so hard to find in the first place, and what it means for our understanding of black hole formation. Farming animals and plants for human consumption is a massive operation with a big effect on the planet. A new research project that calculated the environmental impact of global food production shows highly variable results for different foods—and for the same foods grown in different locations. Sarah talks with one of the researchers—Joseph Poore of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom—about how understanding this diversity can help cut down food production’s environmental footprint and help consumers make better choices. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Listen to previous podcasts. [Image: Miltos Gikas/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Public opinion on the morality of animal research is on the downswing in the United States. But some researchers think letting the public know more about how animals are used in experiments might turn things around. Online News Editor David Grimm joins Sarah Crespi to talk about these efforts. Sarah also talks Ken Wachter of the University of California, Berkeley about his group’s careful analysis of data from all living Italians born 105 or more years before the study. It turns out the risk of dying does not continue to accelerate with age, but actually plateaus around the age of 105. What does this mean for attempts to increase human lifespan? In this month’s book segment, Jen Golbeck talks with Simon Winchester about his book The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World. Read more book reviews at our books blog, Books et al. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Listen to previous podcasts. [Image: Chris Jones/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Pirate’s gold may not be that far off, as there are valuable metals embedded in potato-size nodules thousands of meters down in the depths of the ocean. Host Meagan Cantwell talks with Staff Writer Paul Voosen about the first deep-sea test of a bus-size machine designed to scoop up these nodules, and its potential impact on the surrounding ecosystem. In an expedition well above sea level, the Hayabusa2 spacecraft touched down on the asteroid Ryugu last month. And although the craft won’t return to Earth until 2020, researchers have learned a lot about Ryugu in the meantime. Meagan speaks with Seiji Sugita, a professor at the University of Tokyo and principal investigator of the Optical Navigation Camera of Hayabusa 2, about Ryugu’s parent body, and how this study can better inform future asteroid missions. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Download transcript (PDF) Listen to previous podcasts. About the Science Podcast [Image: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

This week we have two interviews from the annual meeting of AAAS in Washington D.C.: one on the history of food and one about our own perceptions of food and food waste.  First up, host Sarah Crespi talks with Christina Warinner from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, about the history of dairying. When did people first start to milk animals and where? It turns out, the spread of human genetic adaptations for drinking milk do not closely correspond to the history of consuming milk from animals. Instead, evidence from ancient dental plaque suggests people from all over the world developed different ways of chugging milk—not all of them genetic. Next, Host Meagan Cantwell speaks with Sheril Kirshenbaum, co-director of the Michigan State University Food Literacy and Engagement Poll, about the public’s perception of food waste. Do most people try to conserve food and produce less waste? Better insight into the point of view of consumers may help keep billions of kilograms of food from being discarded every year in the United States. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Download the transcript (PDF) Ads on the show: Columbia University and Magellan TV Listen to previous podcasts. About the Science Podcast [Image:  Carefull in Wyoming/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Book review of CAPITAL AND IDEOLOGY

Find a new and historic recipe for a dish to put on your Thanksgiving table in What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking. This cookbook, published in 1881, is highlighted in a recent post on the Library of Congress Blog. Abby Fisher perfected her culinary skills as an enslaved cook on a South Carolina plantation but went on to establish a successful catering business in San Francisco and publish a compilation of her recipes—one of the first by an African-American. Learn more about this remarkable woman and, this Thanksgiving, sample a taste of history!

Click here to go to the Library of Congress Blog post, "Sample a Taste of History This Thanksgiving!"

Berlin, Heidelberg : Springer Berlin Heidelberg : Imprint: Springer, 2014

Heidelberg : Physica-Verlag Heidelberg, 2006