Research Spotlight
Caricaturing Terror
How does one draw tragedy? How can terror be depicted without trivialising the sorrow of those who suffered from it? In Pakistan terror is not something one can caricaturise, when the terrorist can be present a few metres from you, ready to detonate a bomb in the centre of your hometown [1]. When you cannot […]
Molecules that make you think: using genetics to understand our emotions
The most common question I’ve been asked when introducing my work to strangers, friends, and Tinder dates has been “but aren’t mental illnesses…in the mind? What do genes or molecules have anything to do with it?” The answer is, in short, everything. Each of our mental functions is fundamentally rooted in biological processes that can […]
Romance Comic Books, the Cold War, and Teaching Women Their Place
I came across romance comic books by accident during a tiring Google search for a topic for a term paper. At first, I thought romance comic books were a joke – that a modern artist had created them to make fun of 1950’s domestic ideals. Then I found out that Captain America creators, Joe Simon […]
Coming Up For Air: 100 Million Years of Ocean Biology
George Cuvier was a young man at the Storming of the Bastille in the summer of 1789. It was under the shadow of the French Revolution that he developed the concept of ‘catastrophism’. In the midst of the radical political changes that were engulfing Europe, Cuvier speculated that the Earth itself had undergone radical, […]
How smart is your smartphone?
Nowadays, smartphones facilitate anything and everything, from sending emails to facial recognition. But did you know these phones also have the capability to diagnose illnesses- sometimes even before the onset of any visible symptoms? Neurological disorders affect hundreds of millions of lives each year. Although these diseases can largely be attributed to genetics, they […]
