Category Archives: Science / Philosophy

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR “Blessings on him, who first invented sleep,” eulogised Miguel de Cervantes, the legendary writer. Yet, the irony is there is a distinct, also alarming, lack of awareness about sleep in the community — general and medical. Many physicians, for instance, continue to simply miss, or ignore, the ever-cascading, veritable surplus of sleep-related disorders. […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR The use of antibiotics is based on the paradigm there is a battle in progress in the body and it must be resolved — and, that the body is not capable of success without drug support. Antibiotics ‘kill’ microorganisms related to a given illness or disease, all right; they also impede their duplication. […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR When Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity ‘toppled’ Sir Isaac Newton’s model which was dominant since the Renaissance, it led to a new resurgence — that the fundamentals of scientific discernment were not a fixed, or inflexible, set of edicts. Rather, such models were elucidations of certain composite portents reliant on societal norms, just […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR The idea of being conscious and having sensory qualities, or perception, are independent of each other. This is autonomous of the sensory qualities that we all know — physical stimulus, physiological response, communication, psychological, or emotional experience. What does this signify? That our sensory qualities, whatever their character, or essence, are distinctive of […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR You are what you are isn’t as simple as it sounds. This is because who we are is based not just on our identities, but also our dreams, hopes, intelligence, memories, the world around us, and neurobiology. Neurobiology is the study of the nervous system and how the brain works, its anatomy, physiology, […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Aging is inevitable, albeit its cadence is not. As the American writer Betty Friedan rightly said, “Aging is not lost youth, but a new stage of opportunity and strength.” While we all know that our bodies age, the whole internal experience smacks of ambiguity, also mystery — although new research explains the aging […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR The idea of consciousness and its relationship between mind and brain have puzzled, bamboozled, and flummoxed philosophers and scientists alike since the dawn of civilisation. They still do — notwithstanding a host of new, breath-taking discoveries, that include peptides, our molecules of emotions. This isn’t all. Molecular biologists have discovered the fundamental building […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Science has, for long, used empirical data to estimate how close a theory is to the truth. But, not all theories, however, can be evaluated in that manner — for a plethora of reasons. In areas, such as string theory, cosmology, and evolutionary biology, for instance, arriving at how close a theory is […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR When Linus Pauling, the legendary chemist and two-time Nobel laureate, discovered that a specific heritable protein variation in a single component of haemoglobin protein complex resulted in sickle cell anaemia, it initiated a new era in biomedical sciences. Years later, the gene responsible for the haemoglobin variant was discovered — including an entire […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR All intelligence, it’s rightly said, leads to god. This is the ultimate truth — the sum of the parts and part of the whole. All things, big or small, also lead to god — because god is supreme intelligence. Where there is no god, there is no intelligence. Where there is, likewise, no […]