Ayan Banerjee

Criticise Bengal. Don’t caricature it. Reality check by Satadru Mukherjee

🚨🇮🇱🇮🇷 BREAKING: Israelis are dining out at restaurants, waiting for a missile to arrive, and the moment the sirens go off — they flee to avoid paying the bill The phenomenon has spread throughout the Zionist Entity & restaurant owners are calling for solutions

🚨 Zinedine Zidane on Italy 3rd World Cup miss in a row : “In that final, Marco Materazzi insulted my sister. I complained, but nothing was done. When I reacted, the referee sent me off, and it cost us the World Cup. My career ended with a red card, but I told them—that was the last World Cup they would win.”

In 1905, Einstein published special relativity. In 1915, he published general relativity. Einstein was just trying to understand the universe. But without Einstein's math, Google Maps would be wrong by 11 kms every single day. Let me tell you why - this is very interesting :)) Your phone doesn't "talk" to GPS satellites. It only listens. Each satellite is broadcasting one thing, constantly: "I am satellite 'A', and it is currently 14:23:00.000000." Your phone receives signals from 4 satellites simultaneously. Because light travels at a known speed, tiny differences in arrival time tell it exactly how far it is from each satellite. 'A' satellite tells you: you're somewhere on a sphere of radius 20,000 km. 'B' satellite: that sphere intersects another sphere - now you're on a circle. 'C' satellite: that circle intersects a third sphere - now you're at 2 points. 'D' satellite: eliminates the last ambiguity and only one point remains. That's you! Except there's a problem nobody thought about until Einstein. The satellites are orbiting at 20,200 km altitude, moving at 14,000 km/h. Two things happen to their clocks simultaneously: - Special relativity: Moving clocks tick slower. At orbital velocity, the satellite clock loses 7.2 microseconds per day - General relativity: Clocks in weaker gravity tick faster. At that altitude, gravity is weaker. The clock gains 45.9 microseconds per day. Net effect: 45.9 - 7.2 = +38.7 microseconds per day. In 38.7 microseconds, light travels 11.6 kilometers. So without correction, the system would accumulate 11.6 km of error. Every single day. In a week, your navigation is useless. The fix is one of the most elegant things in all of engineering. Before each satellite launches, its atomic clock is physically tuned to tick slightly slower than it would on Earth - by exactly 38.7 microseconds per day. Once in orbit, relativistic effects speed it back up. And it arrives at exactly the right rate. Einstein's 1915 paper is baked into the hardware of your phone's navigation system. The next time Google Maps routes you correctly, you're experiencing general relativity. You just didn't know it.

To understand Trump's greatness - the number of times America has defeated a country. Germany - 2 times (1918, 1945) Japan - 1 time (1945) Iran - 18 times (2025-2026)

You have your mother's cells in your brain right now. If she ever carried you, yours are in hers. Scientists looked at the brains of 59 women after they died, ages 32 to 101. In 63% of them, they found their sons' DNA scattered across different brain regions. The cells had traveled from the womb, through the blood, past the wall that normally keeps foreign material out of the brain, and settled in. The oldest woman still carrying her son's cells in her brain was 94. In mice, those cells became functional brain cells. The transfer starts as early as 7 weeks into pregnancy. Your cells slip through the placenta into your mother's body. Hers slips into yours. One study found a mother still had her son's cells in her blood 27 years after giving birth. After delivery, between 50 and 75% of women carry their child's cells. During pregnancy, up to 6% of a woman's blood DNA comes from the baby. When a mother's heart gets damaged during or after pregnancy, the baby's cells travel to the injury, latch on, and turn into beating heart cells, blood vessel lining, and muscle. Heart failure tied to pregnancy has a 50% spontaneous recovery rate, better than every other kind. The Mount Sinai team behind the research thinks the baby's cells are fixing the mother's heart from the inside. The cancer data caught me off guard. A study compared healthy women to women with breast cancer. 85% of the healthy group still carried their children's cells. Only 64% of the breast cancer group did. That works out to about 4x lower odds of getting breast cancer if you kept those cells. The working theory is that they patrol the body and catch cancer cells before they grow. A 2022 study found that in developing mouse brains, a mother's cells controlled the brain's immune cells, preventing them from cutting too many connections between brain cells. Your mom's cells helped wire your brain before you were born. And it stacks across generations. A woman can carry cells from her kids, from her own mother, and even from pregnancies her mother had before her. Three generations of cells from different people, living inside one body.

"You come here to clap for revolution at 7:00 PM and go back to exploit your domestic help at 10:00 PM. You are not my audience; you are my funding." ​Utpal Dutt once hurled these biting words at an audience, perfectly capturing his cynical view of the "champagne socialist." Later, while his play 𝘋𝘶𝘴𝘸𝘰𝘱𝘯𝘦𝘳 𝘕𝘢𝘨𝘢𝘳𝘪(City of Nightmares),a blistering critique of the incumbent government, was in production, the police arrived one evening and demanded he change the script or face the consequences. The playwright, director, and actor famously remarked,"I am an artist, not a makeup man for the police force." That man was Utpal Dutt,a figure far greater than a mere comic caricature or a villainous face in popular cinema. He was a revolutionary artist, fiercely anti-establishment, and a titan of political theatre in India. Today marks his birth anniversary. Tributes to this great scholar, actor, and activist 🙏🙏

Thank you INBA for the honour. The best part was meeting some wonderful inspiring women.

🎼 In front of one of Iran’s largest power plants this young woman plays “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony conveying a message of peace and solidarity from Iran to the world.

Went down the rabbit hole on this. Crows can recognize your face, hold a grudge for years, and warn other crows to avoid you. The thousands in Tel Aviv right now are running a nightly operation that puts most logistics companies to shame. Every evening from fall through early spring, crows worldwide gather in massive groups to sleep together. It's called communal roosting. In 1973, a biologist at Tel Aviv University named Amotz Zahavi figured out why. His theory: the roost works like a group chat. Crows that found food during the day show up well-fed. Crows that didn't eat watch who looks healthy, then follow them the next morning to wherever the food is. The flock is a nightly information exchange. A crow has about 1.5 billion brain cells. That's roughly the same as some monkeys. The cells are just smaller and packed closer together, which may actually make them faster. In lab tests using the same setup for both animals, crows and monkeys held the same number of items in short-term memory: about four. Crows bend wire into hooks to reach food. They teach each other which individual humans are dangerous. In 2024, German researchers taught them to count aloud, using different calls for different numbers. A 2020 study in Science found crows are aware of what they're seeing and can think about it before acting. Until that paper, only humans and monkeys had shown that ability. Israel sits on one of the planet's busiest bird highways. About 500 million birds from 550 species pass through Israeli airspace twice a year. The hooded crow, the species in this footage, lives in Israel year-round and has been spreading across the country for decades. It thrives on city garbage and streetlights. A warm coastal city at dusk in late March, with overflowing bins everywhere, is basically a crow buffet. The "harbinger of doom" thing comes from the Bible and medieval Europe, where people noticed crows gathering near battlefields and plague sites. But the crows showed up after the death. They were eating. People saw the pattern, flipped the cause and effect, and the superstition stuck for a few thousand years. What you're actually watching is one of the smartest animals alive running a logistics network that a Tel Aviv University scientist explained over 50 years ago.

Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have created an innovative spray-on powder called AGCL that can stop severe bleeding in about one second. This powder, made from safe, natural ingredients like alginate, gellan gum, and chitosan, instantly forms a strong hydrogel barrier when it contacts blood. It reacts with calcium ions in the blood to seal the wound quickly, even in deep or irregular injuries—unlike traditional bandages that often fall short. The material absorbs more than 7 times its weight in blood, sticks firmly under high pressure, and supports fast tissue healing. It's fully biocompatible, with very low risk of cell damage. Developed with input from an active-duty South Korean Army Major, it's built for extreme conditions like battlefields and disaster zones, where rapid bleeding control can be life-saving. It also stays effective for up to 2 years in hot or humid storage. This breakthrough promises to transform not only military trauma care but also civilian emergencies, surgeries, and medical aid in remote areas. The research was published in Advanced Functional Materials. [Son, Y., Pak, K., Lee, T., Prayogo, M. C., Choi, J., Kang, S., Kang, M., Oh, B., Sun, S. Y., Kim, S., Im, S. G., Jon, S., & Park, S. (2025), "An Ionic Gelation Powder for Ultrafast Hemostasis and Accelerated Wound Healing", Advanced Functional Materials]