Inner Nature: Rock honeybee encounter in Chennai, India
By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times
I am currently in India. My father lives in Chennai, a city on the southeast Bay of Bengal coast, in a flat (apartment) in a tower block. Recently a swarm of honeybees showed up and settled on a large waterpipe that ran above a public stairwell. Anxious that passersby would get stung, a decision was made by the maintenance crew to call in pest control. A previous...
Inner Nature: Shapes of animal bodies
By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times
The study of animal form and function is both illuminating and fascinating, panning from simple to complex forms. The morphing started 750-odd million years ago. At this time, the Earth was not young by any means! It was already about 3.5 billion years old (80% of its age today, which is about 4.3 billion years old) and populated by cyanobacterial mats, and single-celled...
Inner Nature: Inosculation
By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times
I was taking a walk the other day (in a tropical country) and came across limbs from two trees that had twisted around each other and had actually grown into each other, presumably sharing their vasculature at the point of contact. These kisses are termed inosculation. It happens when the bark between the abutted limbs wears away due to friction and the vascular...
Boys HS Tennis: Downingtown East defeats Unionville, 6-1
Singles Matches
Matt Miller (UHS) lost to Shriram Madam (2-6, 6-7)
Andrew Ou (UHS) defeated Rohan Gargya (4-6, 6-3, 6-2)
Matt Farrell (UHS) lost to Soumil Patel (1-6, 5-7)
Double Matches
Ryan Megill/Jack Barrickman (UHS) lost to Abhineet Srivastava/Abhiraj Srivastava (1-6, 6-2, 4-6)
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Inner Nature: A chat with ChatGPT about bioelectricity
By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times
The power of a good story is that has sound grounding in fact, but also pushes the boundary of belief. Is it too much to imagine that our world will be un-livable soon due to the effects of climate change? Will watching the movie The Day After Tomorrow change your mind? Will watching GAATACA sensitize you to the possible outcomes of human genetic engineering? Will...
Inner Nature: Antibiotic Ambivalence
By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times
Pathogens are organisms which cause disease, and we are regularly exposed to these pathogens through the food we eat, people we mingle with, animals we tend, and soil we dig.
Until the mid-twentieth century, vaccinations had been the preventive method. The discovery that weakened bacteria and viruses could activate the immune system to fight them at the next sighting...
Inner Nature: Natives vs. Non-Natives
By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times
Now that gardening season is underway, gardeners are drawn to plant sales and nurseries like a bee to honey. The general advice is to shun “invasives” and “exotic” plants, selecting instead “native”” plants to support local fauna. But what makes a plant, animal, fungus, a native? What is the generational number for drawing the demarcation line of from...
Inner Nature: The medicine/poison cabinet
By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times
We seldom think of the home or medicine cabinet as a storehouse of poisons, but that is what they are. From the very food we eat, the sprays we clean with, to the drugs we take, the chemical activity of – um, chemicals – can have diabolical effects upon biological systems. In this article, I will explore a few of the drugs we use to keep ourselves healthy, and...
Inner Nature: The Otherworldly Octopus
By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times
I was watching a male ruby-throated hummingbird at my feeder the other day. Hummingbirds fascinate me. Besides being charismatic and heart-stoppingly beautiful, they are feisty. I watched him drink his fill and then sit on a nearby branch to play dog-in-the-manger, chasing away other hummingbirds who dared to try to take what he didn’t want. Their speed, their...
Inner Nature: Beekeeping in Ukraine
By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times
“History is all explained by geography.” Robert Penn Warren, novelist and poet (24 Apr 1905-1989)
In this article, I want to pay homage to Ukraine’s beekeepers and beekeeping in light of the many wars that have washed over this beleaguered land. With a land area only slightly smaller than the state of Texas, it lies at many junctions: between Europe...
