The BBC ran an excellent second series of three episodes of “Trust Me, I’m a Doctor”. You can dig into all their conclusions here. Here are the take away lessons from it: 1. Moderate amount of exercise every day is better than few intense gym sessions a week. Anything outdoors from walking to gardening is good enough to be considered moderate. Most exercises...

Despite my love for new technology, I’ve become averse to adopting it right away. This may be a reflection of having conservative parents who worked as retailers in the tech industry. Even though my dad had access to the latest gadgets, he hardly ever switched to using them everyday. When advising clients, he made it clear which devices actually offered...

A review of The Sports Gene by David Epstein Winners, it is said, are not born but made. That, however, is not the whole truth, as David Epstein, an investigative reporter with Pro Publica, shows in his book The Sports Gene. In recent decades, the role of genes in causing diseases has been elucidated time and again. So it should not be surprising that...

The BBC has a nice documentary on Crossrail, a £15 billion project to build a new 120-km train line passing through central London. I knew that this is a great engineering challenge, but I did not appreciate the scale of difficulty the engineers faced. You can watch the three one-hour episodes here (need UK access), or here’s the summary of the interesting...

A few years ago, I formed a group of science enthusiasts. Our goal was to fix the problem of poor science communication in India. There only existed a handful of science publications and fewer among them did the work that was so critical to a democracy with the potential that India has. We discussed many ideas but couldn’t implement them. After all...

The problem is not that there is too much information, but that there is too little of the right kind In his brilliant book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson shows through many examples how history often credits the wrong person. They show how being in the right place at the right time or publishing your ideas in the right publication so...