Leslee Lazar

A new study has found that microbes living in the gut could cause autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Researchers found that when bacteria from the faeces of humans with ASD were injected into mice, the latter developed autism-like symptoms. This gives us hope that we could treat ASD with simple dietary supplements called probiotics.

All probiotics are simply concentrated liquids with a very large number of ‘good’ bacteria that, when consumed, colonise the intestines an...

In a recent article in the Hindustan Times, Amitabha Bhattacharya, a retired IAS officer, defended the Centre’s now-defunct directive that research in central universities must be aligned to “national priorities” and avoid “irrelevant” topics. His defence was ostensibly to enhance the quality of PhD research.
However, he failed to mention how working on topics specified by the government could increase the quality of research nor is there any clarity on of what “irrelevant” research is and wh...

Sometime in the near future, a soldier is on a mission to track a missing child in dense jungle. She searches all day in trying conditions. As night approaches, she will be forced to give up on the search because she can’t see in the dark.
Thankfully, she has access to new technology that can enhance her vision in such conditions. As the Sun sets, she fetches a small bottle from her gear and applies a few drops of a fluid into her eyes. The fluid contains bio-engineered nanoparticles that see...

People facing financial hardships are prone to making poor decisions: they don’t save money, they don’t adhere to medications regimes, borrow too much, etc. Can we blame the poor for being poor? What is the cause of such bad decision-making? Can we assume that they have the same pressures on their cognitive capacities as people who have abundant resources at their disposal?
There is a growing body of research that shows that financial strain can have widespread effects on how we make decision...

An article about Trepanation, the ancient practice of drilling holes in the skull

An article about evolution of communication macaque monkeys

Given that the first ever description of the chikungunya virus was “a dengue-like disease” it is only natural that these two diseases have been interconnected. The similarities that ties these diseases are at multiple levels—symptoms, mosquito vectors, viruses and geographic distributions. Also, recent studies have reported chikungunya-dengue co-infections in recent outbreaks and report severe symptoms. For example, patients report severe pain in small joints harsher than chikungunya mono-inf...

We have an intuitive understanding that objects do not change shape in time and space. We know that the coffee mug does not grow bigger as we bring it toward us and it surely does not cease to exist when we cover it with a newspaper. This knowledge, which is seen in infants as young as 5-months old is called object permanence. Without this information our perception of the world would be chaotic and frightening.
But what are the neural correlates of this property? Turns out, this is still an ...

Scientists stumbled upon hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) during World War II while treating patients whose blood cells were destroyed by high levels of radiation. They found that transplanting the spleen and bone marrow of healthy subjects produced new blood cells in these patients. Further research showed that the cells involved in this recovery are HSCs, which are multipotent stem cells—these cells have the capacity to differentiate into multiple blood cell types; erythrocytes, eosinophils, ...

In 1966, two virologists discovered a new virus from samples collected from an outbreak of fever in Maharashtra. They named it Chandipura virus (CHPV), after the town where they made the discovery. However, much research into the newly discovered virus did not ensue as the CHPV was classified as an ‘orphan virus’—a category for viruses that do not have pathogenic qualities—and was left to scientific obscurity.
That changed in 2004, when an encephalitis outbreak in Andhra Pradesh claimed 183 l...

In the peak litchi season, every year in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, a crisis unfolds with unflinching regularity. Hundreds of kids, after having gorged on litchis, die of encephalopathy. Several scientific teams have been working to find the reason behind this debacle. Finally, we have an answer.

Viral infections of brain cause a spectrum of diseases. Some are fatal, some leave lasting sensory, motor and cognitive deficits. One such important disease in the Indian context is Japanese Encephalitis (JE), caused by the Japanese Encephalitis Virus (JEV). A new study by scientists from National Brain Research Centre (NBRC), Manesar and University of Calcutta (UoC) has shown that JEV infection in human neural stem cells causes the host cell’s endoplasmic reticulum to malfunction, forcing in...