A bizarre rare event was recently detected by scientists
Hello!
I'm thrilled to share that my second book, When The Drugs Don’t Work: The Hidden Pandemic that Could End Modern Medicine just hit the shelves last weekend! This book is a deep dive into the alarming rise of superbugs that render our antibiotics ineffective, presenting a hidden yet formidable threat to modern medicine.
Have you gotten your copy yet? You can get it on Amazon or in bookstores in India.
Last week, there was a furor about last-resort antibiotics being found in chickens in India, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
We can’t afford to ignore the hidden pandemic of superbugs anymore. In my book, I spell out in plain language how superbugs threaten modern medicine, how we got here, and what we need to do to keep things from getting worse… because things will get worse unless we act now.
Here’s the truth.
We pump lifesaving antibiotics into chickens to plump them up.
Pharma companies dump massive amounts of antibiotics into our rivers contaminating the environment.
We take antibiotics whenever we want to, often without a prescription and when they’re not needed.
As a result a high proportion of Indians carry superbugs that are untreatable. And the numbers are rising everyday.
Meanwhile there have been no truly new types of effective antibiotics discovered in FORTY YEARS!
It’s getting to the point that a common infection, wound, C-section, birth, or a routine visit to a clinic or hospital can turn into a death sentence.
We can stop the superbug pandemic, but first we need to stop being complacent.
Tomorrow I head off to Barcelona to a meeting where nearly 17,000 doctors and scientists will converge. I’ll share thoughts from this important meeting in plain language.
An event so rare that’s it’s only been found to occur three times before in 3.5 billion years of life on Earth as been detected again.
The first time gave rise to all complex life and the second time it happened, it created plants.
I discuss this study published in Science and its significance in my popular science column for Hindustan Times this week.
Life on this planet is incredibly diverse, but, paradoxically, the rules that govern life as we know it are simple.
A certain harmony is maintained across all of life, from bacteria and amoeba to complex plants and animals. All life shares elements such as genetic material in the form of DNA and cellular structures.
Discoveries that fundamentally alter how we perceive life are rare.
Take for example, organelles. Organelles developed from bizarre events in which one cell engulfs a smaller one, not as prey but as a partner, leading to a permanent and beneficial merger. This event, known as primary endosymbiosis, is exceedingly rare. Up until now, they were thought to have occurred only three times in 3.5 billion years of life on this planet.
One such event led to mitochondria, organelles that make complex life possible. Another gave rise to chloroplasts that allowed plants to evolve. A third gave rise to rarer organelles known as chromatophores.
Now, the discovery of a microscopic nitrogen-capturing factory – an organelle named the "nitroplast" – in a kind of marine algae alters what we know about the boundaries of life. Nitrogen is essential to life but most complex life forms can't use nitrogen from the air directly.
The discovery of the nitroplast is exciting because it upends current thinking on biological nitrogen fixation. And it might lead to new ways of fixing nitrogen that don’t rely on chemical fertilizers!
And last but not least…
An ancient snake in India might have been longer than a school bus and weighed a ton
They gave it the name Vasuki indicus after "the mythical snake king Vasuki, who wraps around the neck of the Hindu deity Shiva."