Anoop Menon @nitroargo

Jo Nagai was raising swallowtail butterflies at his home in Kobe, Japan, when he noticed something odd. The ones he had looked after as caterpillars seemed to recognize him. Wild butterflies fled. His didn't. He was in second grade. He wrote a four-page letter to Dr. Martha Weiss, an entomologist at Georgetown University who had studied whether moths could retain memories through metamorphosis. He asked if she could help him design a version of her experiment for butterflies. She said yes. Using a muscle therapy device, Jo trained caterpillars to associate the scent of lavender with a mild vibration. When the caterpillars became butterflies, 70 per cent of them still avoided the lavender. Their brains had been completely rebuilt during metamorphosis. The memory survived anyway. Then he bred them. The offspring, which had never been trained, also avoided lavender. So did their grandchildren. Without ever experiencing the vibration, two generations of butterflies inherited an aversion to a scent their grandmother had been taught to fear. Jo documented it all in a 33-page research paper and presented his findings at the International Congress of Entomology in Kobe in 2024. He was 10. A second grader wrote a letter to a Georgetown professor, and together they found evidence that butterflies can pass memories down through generations. -Wilderness Whisper

Next in who after the Ramanujan series? At a tender age of 16, a brilliant but completely unguided boy from Tamil Nadu joined the National Defence Academy & was commissioned into the Indian Navy's electrical branch . He did not have the luxury of a quiet university setting; he was trained in practical skills to maintain weapons systems on warships. But Arogyaswami Paulraj possessed an insatiable, self-taught obsession with the advanced mathematics of signal processing, control theory & information theory. He studied advanced matrices & random variables by lamplight on naval ships. By the late 1970s, India faced a serious strategic challenge. After the 1971 Indo-Pak War exposed weaknesses in imported sonars, the Navy needed an advanced anti-submarine warfare system but was blocked by international export restrictions. The Navy turned to Paulraj, then a rising officer with a PhD from IIT Delhi (earned while still in service). He was tasked with leading a major indigenous project to develop a world-class hull-mounted panoramic sonar from scratch. Operating under intense resource scarcity, Paulraj’s mathematical genius took over. He designed complex signal-processing algos that could filter the chaotic, deafening acoustic noise of the ocean to pinpoint enemy submarines. The resulting system, APSOH (Advanced Panoramic Sonar Hull), inducted in 1983, completely stunned global military observers. It did not just work, it outperformed contemporary Western systems. After setting up major defense labs in India, Paulraj retired from active naval service & arrived at Stanford University in 1991 as a research associate. This is where the story shifts from military history to modern legend. While working on signal separation experiments for airborne military reconnaissance, Paulraj noticed a strange, fleeting physical phenomenon. When a radio signal is transmitted in a crowded area (like a city with buildings), it bounces off walls & scatters into 1000s of chaotic, distorted paths. Engineers treated this scattering as a nightmare, multipath interference that corrupted data. Paulraj had a paradigm-shifting realization rooted in multi-variable calculus & spatial matrices: What if the scattering was not a bug, but a feature? He realized that if we used multiple antennas at the transmitter & multiple antennas at the receiver, we could use advanced matrix mathematics to isolate those scattered paths & stream parallel, independent channels of data over the exact same frequency, at the exact same time. He called it MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output). When he 1st proposed it, the academic world mocked him. Prominent profs & industry skeptics told him it violated the laws of physics & information theory. They claimed it was mathematically impossible to multiply data speeds w/o expanding bandwidth. Paulraj did no back down. He built his own prototype, founded a startup & proved the mathematics in real-world silicon. He designed the microscopic architecture, the microchip algos that allowed small devices to execute these hyper-complex spatial matrix calculations in fractions of a microsecond. If we look at the device we are using to read this right now, look at the top corners of our screen. We cannot see them, but embedded inside the frame of our phone are multiple microscopic antennas operating on Paulraj’s exact MIMO-OFDMA mathematics. Every single modern 4G network, 5G network & high-speed Wi-Fi router on Earth is built entirely on the mathematical foundation invented by the self-taught Indian Navy officer who packed his bags for Stanford. He did not just solve a math problem; he built the invisible highway that carries nearly 100% of the world's mobile data traffic today.

I taught JEE physics for years. That paper breaks strong kids in three hours. This exam is five hours of theory and five hours of lab work, and these five did close to perfect scores on it. Let me tell you what actually happened. The International Physics Olympiad is the world championship of school physics. It was the 56th edition. Held in Bucaramanga, Colombia, from July 5 to 12. 381 students. More than 85 countries. Every one of them the best physics student their country could find. India sent five kids. All five came back with gold. Their names are Kanishk Jain from Pune. Riddhesh Anant Bendale from Indore. Rishit Garg from Dwarka in Delhi. Shresth Suraiya from Mumbai. Svarit Joshi from Ahmedabad. We know a hundred cricketers by their nickname and not one of these boys. :) That clean sweep put India at joint World Number One. Tied with China, Russia, Kazakhstan, South Korea and Taiwan. Those are countries that pour serious money and national pride into science education. We are standing level with them. Now here is what the exam actually was. Two papers. Each five hours long. The theory paper had three problems. One on the thermodynamics of paramagnetic cooling. One on the photoionisation of ozone. One on the dynamics of electron positron pairs. The experimental paper was another five hours in a lab, working through heat transfer and thermodynamic processes in fluids. That means you get given equipment you have never seen, and you have to design your own experiment, take your own readings, handle the errors, and reach a real answer. Not multiple choice. No shortcuts. No pattern recognition. You either understand physics or you sit there for five hours. HBCSE says the Indian students were near perfect on theory and excellent on the practical too. Now, this was India's 27th appearance at the IPhO. Across all those years, about 44 percent of Indian students have won gold, 41 percent silver, 10 percent bronze. In the last ten years, every single Indian student has come home with a medal. 62 percent gold, 38 percent silver. Not one kid has gone and come back empty handed in a decade. Five golds in one year has happened only twice. This year, and in 2018. So who built this. The programme is run by HBCSE, the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. It sits under TIFR, which sits under the Department of Atomic Energy. They run the whole funnel. A national exam, then a national olympiad, then a brutal selection and training camp, and out of everyone in the country, five kids get on a plane. The team was led by Professor Anwesh Mazumdar of HBCSE-TIFR and Dr Leena Joshi from St Xavier's College, Mumbai. The scientific observers were Professor Ananda Dasgupta from IISER Kolkata and Nisha Kelkar from Gogate-Joglekar College in Ratnagiri. Yes. Ratnagiri. A college in a small coastal town in Maharashtra. This is public education doing something the private coaching industry could never do on its own. The coaching industry is very good at one thing. Teaching you to solve a known problem fast. That is what JEE and NEET reward, and I say that with love because I was part of that world. But an olympiad paper does not have a known type. There is no shortcut chapter. There is no formula sheet that saves you. You have to sit with a problem you have never seen and think. That is a completely different muscle. And a government funded centre has been quietly building it in Indian teenagers for 27 years. So yes, be proud. Loudly. HBCSE also shared that around 64 percent of India's olympiad medallists go on to do a PhD. But only about 32 percent of medallists end up settling in India. I do not say that to spoil the moment. These kids owe the country nothing. They earned every option they have. But it should tell us something. We are excellent at finding this talent. We are excellent at training it. We are still not great at giving it somewhere worth staying. Congratulations Kanishk, Riddhesh, Rishit, Shresth and Svarit. This is one of the best things an Indian did this year and most of the country will never hear about it.

DAE India @DAEIndia

6 days ago

🇮🇳 India Tops the World at the 56th International Physics Olympiad 2026! 🥇🥇🥇🥇🥇India's young physicists deliver an extraordinary performance at #IPhO2026 in Colombia. All five members of the Indian team win Gold Medals. 1/3 @PMOIndia @DrJitendraSingh @HBCSE_TIFR @TIFRScience

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Her name is Chhaya Sharma. In December 2012, a young woman was gang raped on a moving bus in Delhi and left to die. The whole country knew her story. Almost nobody knows the name of the woman who hunted down the men who did it. She was a police officer, then Deputy Commissioner of Police in south Delhi. When the case landed, the pressure was unlike anything the force had seen. Crowds filled the streets. Cameras waited outside her office. Every hour without an arrest was another headline calling the police useless. She did not let any of it touch her team. She stood between them and the noise, and told them to do the work properly. For six days her team chased the accused across five states. She kept her people focused on one thing, evidence. Every detail documented, every forensic sample handled correctly, nothing rushed, nothing sloppy, because a case this big could collapse on a single mistake. All of the accused were caught within days. Then came the part that mattered even more. Her team filed the chargesheet in just eighteen days. It was built so carefully that it survived every level of the courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, and ended in conviction with the maximum punishment. The rest of her career has been quieter and just as hard. She has spent years going after human traffickers, and has led operations that pulled children out of the hands of people who were selling them. In 2019, an international award for courage was given to her in America, an honour once given to Malala Yousafzai. The nation cried for the victim, and rightly so. But justice did not arrive on its own. A woman in uniform went out and dragged it back, and then went quietly on to the next case.

An Indian scientist at Harvard discovered ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate). Then he helped create the first chemotherapy drug and the first tetracycline antibiotic. Harvard still refused him tenure. A bowling alley would not let him bowl. He died at 53, without an obituary. His medicines save tens of millions of lives every year. Most American doctors who prescribe them have no idea what his name was. His name was Yellapragada Subbarow (Subba Rao). He was born in 1895 in Bhimavaram, India. His father was a Sanskrit scholar who died from tropical sprue. Tropical sprue is an acquired malabsorptive disorder found in tropical regions, characterized by chronic diarrhea, weight loss, and severe nutritional deficiencies. It is most commonly associated with deficiencies in vitamin B12 and folic acid, resulting in anemia, fatigue, and glossitis. The same disease killed two of his brothers. As a child, Subbarow watched them fade away and decided he would spend his life fighting disease. He failed his school exams twice. Passed on the third attempt. His future father-in-law paid for his medical school books. Subbarow married his daughter and repaid the debt. In October 1922, he arrived in Boston with borrowed money and broken English. He was 27. He entered Harvard Medical School and joined the biochemistry PhD program. He began working under a senior researcher named Cyrus Fiske. Long hours. Little pay. But he was at Harvard, and he did not care. In 1925, they developed the Fiske-SubbaRow assay, a method for measuring phosphorus in body fluids. It is still used today in kidney failure testing, vitamin D testing, and prostate cancer work. It became one of the most cited methods in biochemistry history. Then they found something even bigger in 1926 - ATP - Adenosine triphosphate. The energy molecule that powers every cell in every living thing on Earth. That discovery changed biochemistry. It also proved that the 1922 Nobel laureate had been wrong about how muscles worked. Muscles did not run on glycogen. They ran on ATP. Subbarow earned his PhD in 1930. He stayed at Harvard for another decade. Paper after paper. Discovery after discovery. And every year, Harvard refused to promote him. The biochemistry department had never given tenure to a foreigner. They were not going to begin with an Indian. His colleagues took him fishing. Played tennis with him. Came to dinner at his home. Then voted against him year after year. Outside the laboratory, he met the same wall. He bought an airplane and learned to fly because he loved flying. Once, he tried to go bowling. The local alley refused him entry. The sign said it was “open only to the Caucasian race.” Then Fiske turned against him. The senior researcher began blocking Subbarow’s discoveries out of jealousy. Some of Subbarow’s work had to be rediscovered years later by other scientists because Fiske kept his findings hidden. May 1940. Harvard denied him tenure for the last time. After 17 years of groundbreaking work, he walked away. Lederle Laboratories in New York hired him as Associate Director of Research. By the end of the year, he was Director. In the next eight years, he changed medicine. He developed diethylcarbamazine, an oral medicine that killed the tropical worms crippling American soldiers in the Pacific. The World Health Organization still uses it. He isolated folic acid from liver and worked out how to produce it on a large scale. Today, folic acid in pregnancy prevents birth defects in tens of millions of pregnancies every year. The same family of diseases that killed his father and brothers became preventable because of him. Then Dr. Sidney Farber called from Boston with an idea: maybe a drug that blocked folic acid in cancer cells could kill childhood leukemia. Subbarow’s team created the drug. They called it Aminopterin. In December 1947, Farber gave it to an eight-year-old boy dying from leukemia. Within weeks, the cancer cells began to disappear. It was the first chemotherapy drug in history. The first time anyone had put cancer into remission using a pill. Subbarow’s team later refined it into Amethopterin, now known as methotrexate. It became a gold standard treatment for leukemia, lymphoma, breast cancer, and lung cancer. Then rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, and Crohn’s disease. The World Health Organization lists it as an essential medicine. Tens of millions of people use it every year. In 1948, his lab produced Aureomycin. The first tetracycline antibiotic - a broad-spectrum one that killed typhus, cholera, pneumonia, and many bacteria that penicillin could not touch. It opened the door to the whole tetracycline family: doxycycline, minocycline, and drugs still used today against plague, malaria, anthrax, and drug-resistant infections. He was 53 years old. He had created medicines that would save tens of millions of lives. August 8, 1948. Yellapragada Subbarow suffered a heart attack at his home in New York and died. No American newspaper gave him a front-page obituary. No university held a memorial. The Nobel Committee never honoured him. His own colleague George Hitchings later won a 1988 Nobel Prize for work built directly on Subbarow’s foundation. Subbarow was not even nominated. In 1950, Argosy magazine published a feature about him titled “Miracle Man of the Miracle Drugs.” It began with a line that still hits hard. “You’ve probably never heard of Dr. Yellapragada Subbarow. Yet because he lived, you may be alive and are well today. Because he lived, you may live longer.” Most Americans had not heard of him in 1950. Most still have not. Harvard has never officially honoured him. American medical schools mostly do not teach his name. The Nobel Committee that honoured Hitchings for work built on his foundation never corrected the record. Every methotrexate prescription written today remains silent about the man behind it. India remembers. The government issued a postage stamp for his 100th birthday. His childhood home became a museum. Indian medical schools teach his name. But the country that denied him tenure, refused to let him bowl, and allowed him to die unknown - the same country that uses his drugs every day - still mostly does not know him. Here is the truth. If someone you know has ever taken methotrexate for cancer or an autoimmune disease. If someone you love has taken folic acid during pregnancy. If you have ever been prescribed doxycycline for an infection. That was him. Yellapragada Subbarow. Born 1895. Died 1948. Saved tens of millions of lives, while a country he loved barely knows what it owes him. Please remember his name and let your near and dear know about this little-known scientific legend born on this soil but never got the true recognition that he deserved. A story you need to know. A story all of us need to know. #Medicine #Unknownlegends @centerofright @KiranKS

@kunksed @ponnappa +1 for Codex steer

@MagnifyClub Taj

@sayashk cc @ponnappa

@ZachSDaniel1 AI tools are analogous to power tools. We went from a hammer to a nail gun. Imagine explaining to a CEO, “hey good news, you can fire your construction crew and build your office yourself with this nail gun since its way more efficient than using a hammer”

@lochieaxon I think rive.app already has this (rive.app/docs/editor/an…)

Vibe coding will make you millionaire

Daphne: "Rusty as shit, might not even fire" Mickey: "Are you talking about me or the gun?" - Sherwood, Season 2 British humour is underrated.

One of the features I like about Codex is the ability to steer conversations when the agent assumes something incorrectly

When I first read this, I thought @joulee's team had added an AI feature to their product. But this product is at sundial.md and her's is at sundial.so

Belinda @belindmo

4 weeks ago

Proud to announce the private beta of Sundial! An editor built for human understanding.

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Amazon Prime wants me to watch Citadel Season 2 so bad that they emptied my 'Continue Watching' list and put this as the only item in it.

We had collected thousands of hours of speech data, we needed to transcribe the speech to text. Teams were waiting for GPU credits etc. I was talking to the team at an internship meet where there were some 300 interns. I saw that each intern was carrying a laptop. There was compute sitting in front of us. I told the Viswam team why cant we use the compute of the laptops to transcribe the audio or convert pdfs to text using OCR. If we have 30,000 interns and each student contributes 1 hour of compute, we have 30,000 hours per day :) Viswam team created simple tools in a day to access the data and assign it based on compute donated and do the transcription. Below is the leaderboard till yesterday. Community FTW :)

Human beings have turned into Dashboards 😀

Mumbai is named after Mumba - goddess of the Kolis, the fisherwomen who fed this city before it learned greed. When her daughters take revenge, the sea turns bloody. Introducing "MACHI MAFIA" 💀 (Machi is fish in Hindi) w/ @heybipasha @BombayLocale

@thecontrarian @mknid @NYTmag for now, your best option is to report the video under spam/misleading and hope that others do the same. @mknid should also file a copyright complaint form using this link - youtube.com/copyright_comp…

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