Society

This tiny hamlet is a birdwatcher’s paradise. It’s also an ornithologist’s nightmare. For, Jatinga remains a place where birds are supposed to commit suicide. Jatinga village, inhabited primarily by members of the Jaintia tribe, on the foothills of the Barail Range in the Northeast Indian state of Assam is a halting place for many birds. This mysterious phenomenon which has had ornithologists from the world over fumbling for answers is known to locals as a suspected mass suicide committed by...

A few days back, I chanced upon fast-crumbling cuttings of some of my old write-ups. None of those can be found online today since they predate the Internet era. I picked one up, and decided to key it in to upload it on to my blog since it was my first full-fledged feature on cinema. It had been written in April 1995 and was a critique of Clint Eastwood, who had at that time been awarded a Special Oscar for his contribution to Hollywood cinema. As I feverishly keyed the article in, I was...

Many university students use scholarly databases like they would Google, revealing an astonishingly poor understanding of how to refine searches for better research results, a US study has found. The Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries (ERIAL) Project, a two-year study of the student research process involving five US universities, included extensive interviews with students, librarians and other academics in an effort to better understand 21st Century student research habits...

I was a tad surprised when he told me that he wouldn’t be able to meet me late evening since it was late, and he would have to return home. You don’t always expect guys to rush homewards just because it is a trifle late. We had initially planned to meet early evening, but another appointment had held me up. So we caught up on phone, and fixed 8:30 the morrow morn for a tête-à-tête. Since you don’t expect things to move at the same pace in Kashmir as it does in Delhi, I took it easy. I was late...

Women who win the Best Actress Oscar are at a higher risk of divorce than nominees who do not win. On the other hand, Best Actor winners do not experience an increase in the risk of divorce after an Oscar, a new study insists. Tiziana Casciaro, an assistant professor of organisational behaviour at the Rotman School of Management, studied the marital graphs of 751 nominees in the best actor and actress categories of the Academy Awards between1936 to 2010. The results, which have been published...

The usually accepted argument among psychologists had been that marriage generally reduces illegal and aggressive behaviours in men. There were, however, disagreements over the reason for this. A group of researchers now says that the association is a function of matrimony itself or as well as less "antisocial" men being simply more likely to get married. The team of researchers from the Michigan State University led by behaviour geneticist S Alexandra Burt examined the data of 289 pairs of male...

"That's All Right Mama" by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup is the world's oldest rock-and-roll song. Southeastern Louisiana University rock historian Joseph Burns claims it was the first to contain all of the elements that are associated with rock and roll. Burns, who hosts the weekly radio program "Rock School" on Southeastern’s KSLU 90.9 FM radio station, cites the following elements to be identified as a rock and roll number: * It is music that draws heavily from blues and country in a hit form that...

Scientists in the US are more likely to publish fake research than their colleagues from other countries, a study has revealed. The findings appear in the November 16 online issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics. R Grant Steen, Medical Communications Consultants, delved through the PubMed database for every scientific research paper that had been withdrawn in the 2000-2010 period. Research papers that are withdrawn are usually removed from public records. The PubMed database is the only...

The Indian Ministry of Tourism has announced a travel bonanza for att medal winners at the recent Commonwealth Games 2010. Though the ministry had announced its plans during the Games itself, the announcement came only on Thursday. The best of the packages is being offered by the Ministry in association with the state governments of Rajasthan and Karnataka, and the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC). This would be in the form of complimentary travel packages for the medal...

The plague pathogen originated in or near China. Then it evolved and emerged multiple times to cause global pandemics. And it spread far and wide, an international team of scientists has found using DNA fingerprinting analyses. Researchers from Ireland, China, France, Germany and the United States, examined the past 10,000 years of global plague disease events. Their collaborative research traced the roots to somewhere in or around present-day China. The plague spread over various historical...