Vijee Venkatraman

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The Curious Zookeeper of Extraordinary Organisms

In his backyard in Atlanta,Saad Bhamla, professor of chemical and biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, observed the glassy sharpshooter with interest. The lightweight insect was peeing for hours in droplets and proceeded to super-propel them into the distance. A high-speed camera would reveal...

Non-Pooped on Statues

April 3, 2004 Fending off annoying birds Asami Nagai / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer When Kanazawa University chemist Yukio Hirose accepted the Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry at Harvard in 2003, he surprised the audience by thanking the pigeons and crows of his hometown. His...

Tamil Books with Taste and Rigor

When I first met S. Ramakrishnan at his Tiruvanmiyur office, I carried with me a glossy paperback of Dilip Kumar’s Ramavum Umavum. He gently prised it out of my hands and replaced it with the Cre‑A edition — the same text, but dressed in surreal...

Blood Ties & Pig Genes

In 1980, a young man dies of renal failure when his family hesitates to donate a kidney. In Kagitha Sangaligal, Sujatha Rangarajan, a modernist writer and pioneer of science fiction in Tamil, imagined a tragedy. This simple plot, written in spare, unsentimental prose, asked whether...

Radium Madonna

What does a Polish physicist from the early 20th century have in common with a character played by a Tamil actress from the 1960s? More than you might think. Both navigated love, loss, and the lab—and both challenged what women were allowed to do with...

Kaigari Kleptomaniac

On the Streets of Damascus On this particular morning the younger brother appeared on the balcony and shouted down to the potato peddler: “Are those potatoes firm?” The vendor only turned around quickly and called back up with a bitter smile: “I’m not selling. I’m...