Reviews

Indo-Aryan wind instruments have a long lineage, but the harmonium as musicians know it today emerged in nineteenth-century Europe before finding a permanent…

For centuries, folklore across continents has cast the full moon as a catalyst for strange human behaviour. In countless narratives from European villages to…

Jagadish Chandra Bose became famous at the meeting point of two emerging sciences. In plant laboratories he studied electrical responses to touch, heat and…

Leptospirosis is a bacterial infection carried by animals, especially rats. People can acquire it through floodwater or mud contaminated with infected urine,…

For centuries, poets across South Asia marvelled at the way raindrops skitter off a lotus leaf, leaving it immaculate. Only in the 1970s did scientists begin…

Vastu is often presented as an ancient system capable of directing health, wealth, relationships and career success through the arrangement of buildings. In…

In a small village in undivided Bengal in 1893, a boy was born into a modest grocer's family, an unpromising start for a future Fellow of the Royal Society.…

In the Rajasthan village of Khedli, life used to be measured in daylight hours. The sun set at 6:42 pm in winter and children finished homework by the last…

Turmeric has moved from the kitchen spice rack into laboratories, pharmacies and clinical research. Its bright yellow colour comes largely from curcuminoids, a…

Magnetized water is marketed as ordinary water exposed to a magnetic field, often through a jug, bottle, pipe attachment or countertop device. Sellers may…