Our constitution was under attack (from natural elements). Protecting this historic document from deterioration was critical. When two boxes hooked up to nitrogen and oxygen cylinders were delivered to the Indian parliament in 1995, it was sign

#58: Dinosaurs - A Geological Murder Mystery

Oct 8th, 2018 25m 6s

Dinosaurs are sexy beasts. They have colonised our imaginations in movies, books, cartoons and other popular media. The mystery around what happened to them and how they got blitzed off the face of the earth, is what keeps their story alive. A

#57: Our plastic addiction is destroying the planet

Aug 6th, 2018 26m 43s

Of the 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic produced till today, 6.3 billion metric tons has become plastic waste and ONLY nine percent of this has been recycled. After languishing in landfills or floating around as trash, nearly all of this ends

#56: A mystery that goes back more than 4,500 years

Jun 11th, 2018 15m 32s

The Indus Valley Civilization was a Bronze Age civilisation spread across the northwestern regions of South Asia; it was one of three early centres of civilisations of the Old World, and the most widespread. In this episode we look at how the l

#55: Do you speak Esperanto?

May 9th, 2018 16m 2s

What if the world spoke one language? And we never needed Google Translate? One man dreamt of such a language a century ago -- Esperanto. In this episode, we explore the life of Lakshmiswar Sinha, the most famous Indian Esperantist of the 20th

#54: What Insects Could Teach Humans (and Robots) About 3D Vision

Mar 31st, 2018 28m 45s

Humans take 3D vision for granted--we don't stop to gauge the distance of a cup of chai on the table before reaching out for it. It is a complicated process that requires highly-developed neural networks. Or does it? Scientists have found sever

#53: How A New Generation of STEM Books Are Putting The Fun Back In Fundamentals

Mar 2nd, 2018 16m 8s

For many children, especially in India, the thought of picking up a science or maths book inspires terror. There's no fun in a system that promotes rote learning over curiosity and understanding. Fortunately, things are changing. Books that exp

#52: Could Lab-Grown Meat Save the World?

Feb 24th, 2018 18m 25s

A recent study found that India's farmed chickens are dosed with the world's strongest antibiotics. This is done so that they're immune to diseases they could contract in the cramped, filthy quarters that they're kept in. All over the world, th

#51: Forget Labs & Pugs, Say Hello to India's Homegrown Dog Breeds

Feb 6th, 2018 17m 10s

Labradoodles and Saint Bernards are great, but have you ever met a Chippiparai? This lithe stunner is just one of the handful of indigenous dog breeds that are still found around India. Sadly, many of these breeds are disappearing. On this epis

#50: In Search of Martians On Planet Earth

Jan 17th, 2018 13m 15s

Mars has captured our imagination for decades. Our neighbouring planet, easily identifiable as a red orb in the night sky, has inspired scores of research papers, sci-fi novels and alien flicks. People like Elon Musk are even figuring out ways

#49: How the Spanish Flu Affected India's Freedom Struggle

Dec 27th, 2017 17m

The Spanish Flu was the biggest pandemic of the last century. Five hundred million people were affected and over 14 million people died in India, the worst affected country in the world. But apart from taking millions of lives and disrupting fa

#48: The Stories in our Stars: Tribal Astronomy in Ancient India

Dec 12th, 2017 20m 27s

At some point of time, every human that has ever walked this planet has looked up at the night sky and wondered what the cosmos is trying to tell them. Tribes turned to the heavens when looking for structure and found ingenious ways to build th

#47: The Science of the Stampede

Nov 23rd, 2017 17m 47s

Stampedes are all too common in India--at temples, religious festivals, sporting events and most recently, at a railway station in Mumbai. Though it might seem like unpredictable, unorganized chaos, there are actually computational models that

#46: How Our Vocabulary Evolved Over 8,000 Years

Apr 24th, 2017 18m 48s

Isn't it odd that the word for "father" in Spanish ("padre") and Sanskrit ("pitru") sound similar? Especially given the geographic and cultural barriers that separate the two languages? As this episode of The Intersection discovers, there's a r

#45: Decoding The Hype around Hyperloop

Mar 27th, 2017 15m

You've probably heard of the Hyperloop, the high-speed mode of transport that could potentially change the way we travel. Dreamed up by entrepreneur and inventor Elon Musk, the Hyperloop promises to cut travel times substantially, promising to

#44: Music and Emotion

Feb 22nd, 2017 15m 14s

Music has a power to move us; a few notes of a piece of music can make us feel intensely elated or deeply melancholic. Researchers have done significant work to find out how music connects to our brains and how just a few notes can trigger spec

#43: Fantastic Hybrid Beasts and Where to Find Them

Jan 17th, 2017 15m 38s

We have been taught that like the mule, hybrid animals are sterile. They are generally considered to be ‘freaks’ because human beings are obsessed with ‘purity’ of species. However several experiments have shown that hybrid animals can be ferti

#42: Preserving Books - From Mumbai to Dublin

Dec 20th, 2016 15m 17s

In India, preservation and restoration of old manuscripts is not treated with the seriousness it deserves by libraries. Against this environment of callousness, Anand Akolkar wages a somewhat lonely war, from his humble home in Mumbai. He battl

#41: People Power-Coming Together for Science

Nov 30th, 2016 15m 53s

Bird watching is not just a hobby that some enthusiasts undertake to pass their time, it can be an exercise in natural historiography itself. Historically and internationally, the contribution of amateur naturalists has been significant and oft

#40: (Super) Bugs Without Borders

Nov 15th, 2016 13m 24s

39 volunteers. 59 countries. 136 airports. With 400 swabs collected over 3 years. That is what it took for researchers to determine the course of bacteria that affect thousands of people worldwide. Multi drug resistant bacteria are growing more

#39: Racist Artificial Intelligence = Racist Us

Nov 2nd, 2016 15m 39s

People were asked to send in their selfies for a beauty contest judged by AI and the results were shocking. Of the 44 winners of the beauty contest, only one was dark skinned. Elsewhere Microsoft developed a self-learning chat bot, Tay, which w

#38: Aliens on the Radio #Wow, via Big Ear

Oct 18th, 2016 13m 50s

39 years ago, a radio telescope called Big Ear in Ohio received a sudden burst of waves that were most likely from a source near Sagittarius. The signal, called the Wow signal, named after Astronomer Jerry Ehman’s reaction to it, has never been

#37: Measuring Happiness: My GNH Is Bigger Than Yours

Oct 4th, 2016 14m 3s

Bhutan was the first country to take into consideration the happiness of its citizens by measuring GNH (Gross National Happiness). Other institutions in other countries have also tried to set-up similar parameters around the measurement of well

#36: A Cold-War Spy Story, From the Sixties

Sep 20th, 2016 15m 38s

In 1965, Captain Manmohan Singh Kohli, an officer in the Indian navy, led a group of CIA and IB officials on an arduous trek across 125 kilometres, for a covert mission to spy on China’s nuclear capability. They changed course a month into this

#35: Tinder for Vegetables? How Plants Communicate With Potential Mates

Sep 7th, 2016 14m 9s

Communication is not limited only to the words we hear or the signs we see, it can go beyond that. Plants cannot speak, hear, see or move, so how do these plants communicate? Is their language made up of chemicals and signals? In this brand new