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Showing posts with the label The United States

Borders, Border Conflicts, and a Borderless World

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  Earth Has No Boundaries Earth has no borders except natural barriers, mountains and seas. There are no barriers at all, given the travel technologies we possess.  Surreal the concept of borders is, yet, borders are quite concrete too; they can start wars, prompt mass exodus, and provoke all kinds of tricky emotions like national pride, a sense of belonging, unjustified hostilities, and fear of the other. Many national borders have no physical properties. No one can tell where one country ends and another begins by merely looking at them. For that, one needs maps and soldiers, fences and fear.  They are mostly barren land, rivers and deserts, these national borders that we hold on to at huge prices, costing human lives, diplomacy, weapons, and real money. They deceive you if you look at them for long- so normal, one could even feel tempted to step across. The invisibility of such borders evokes many sociological and philosophical questions. Were There Borders Always? At ...
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How Far Away Is a Cancer Vaccine?

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(image source: Pixabay) A cancer vaccine has always remained elusive for medicine and science. Is this situation changing? Is hope rising over the horizon? The Ovarian Cancer Vaccine According to the latest news , Oxford University scientists have developed a vaccine for ovarian cancer . This vaccine, OvarianVax, when available for use, will be able to teach the immune cells in our body to detect and attack ovarian cancer cells in the early stages of this disease. Prof. Ahmed Ahmed is the leading scientist behind this research.  The trial for this vaccine has started. The importance of this development is that when it is ready, this vaccine might wipe out ovarian cancer. Yet, this vaccine is still years away.  Why Is a Cancer Vaccine Still a Mirage? What is Happening on the Research Front? Catherine J Wu, a cancer scientist, was awarded the prestigious Sjöberg Prize for her contribution to cancer research  in February 2024 . She is a professor of medicine at Harvard...
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Paraman, The Street Violinist: Memory of a Man

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  (The folk violin of Pulluvas; image source:  Kannanshanmugam,shanmugamstudio, Kollam , Wikipedia) The Village Visitors  Those were times when things were less complex than they now are. We lived in a bucolic countryside where everyone knew everyone else. The only outsiders who frequented the place were visiting relatives, a bunch of regularly appearing street vendors, the postman, the Gurkha (a man from Nepal who would be paid Rs 10 per month by each family for keeping vigil in the village during nights*), and our very own exclusive beggars. We knew them as they made rounds on almost expected dates and times. Paraman’s Song Paraman, the street violinist, had positioned himself between an artist and a beggar. In our culture, the members of the Pulluva community, who made exquisite music using two delightful musical instruments- a single-string local fiddle and a round mud pot with a tight wire wound across it- were the official local musicians. They would come to sing in...
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Travel Plan: A Trip to Understand The Bermuda Triangle

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  (Image source: grammidistoria.wordpress.com Hi Traveler,  You are a fan of mystery, the inexplicable, and you would love to go probing the geographies, home to such mysteries. For someone like you, the Bermuda Triangle is now not an intangible puzzle. You can visit this region of the sea by entering it from three land masses, which form the three endpoints to the triangle.  The Bermuda Triangle: Basic History and Facts An imaginary triangle drawn connecting Florida, the Bermuda Islands, and Puerto Rico in the North Atlantic Ocean will give you the Bermuda Triangle. The area of this sea stretch is around 1.3 to 3.9 million square kilometres. The exact boundaries of the triangle are not demarcated. Different people at different times set vague definitions of the area under the triangle.    In December 1945, five Navy training aeroplanes navigating the sky above the Bermuda Triangle in the Atlantic Ocean, with 14 men on board, disappeared. A rescue mission was la...
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