Deepfakes: can the AI be harnessed for something good?

While audiences and users need to be educated on the negative implications of deepfakes, the technology can also have positive impacts  

Pearls

COVID-19: Lack of funds in new normal may push some North American ethnic cultures into extinction

Museums and art venues turn to virtual tours to stay afloat but need tech overhaul

Leaf storm

Indian scientists are resorting to tissue culture to salvage plants facing extinction

Bytes

Fight for land

From stricter land laws to revising domicile rules, Uttarakhand residents demand government action to stop the sale of agricultural land to …

Mahua liquor is witnessing a rebrand, but legal framework protecting tribal rights across India is needed

Tribal world is intertwined with mahua but it still suffers from false colonial notions of being a lowly toxic liquor

In Dolly's footsteps

COVID-19: Odisha’s conch blowers scramble to earn a living

Several conch blowers in the state have shifted to working as labourers in farms 

Beyond stoned

World Kiswahili Language Day: How a standard version of the east African language formed and spread across the world

Kiswahili has been adopted as a working language at the African Union

Revival plan for a disappearing tree

The ties that bind

Marking neem

Neem clones identified by Indian scientists will boost export of neem-based products

Medicinal tree survives tissue culture process

Tissue culture technique for medicinal tree succeeds

Words are biotic

Is it a coincidence that areas of linguistic plurality are also areas of biodiversity?

Cahokian culture spread across eastern North America 1,000 years ago in an early example of diaspora

It makes sense to think of Cahokian and Mississippian culture not as one monolithic entity with just one perspective, but instead, a multitude of …

Why we studied proverbs to understand emotion among Ghana's Akan people

They contain valuable cultural information that symbolises a specific society’s uniqueness

Mermaids in Japan – from hideous harbingers of violence to beautiful enchantresses

Japan has adopted the western representation of the mermaid now, in contrast to the  ghoulish ningyo, the half-human fish with a monkey’…

This time for Odisha: How the state should build its cultural capital in 2023

Culture poverty is more ruinous than economic poverty. Wish 2023 will accelerate ‘Make in Odisha’ but culturally too

In Brazil, patients risk everything for the 'right to beauty'

In Brazil, patients are thought of as having the “right to beauty.” In public hospitals, plastic surgeries are free or low-cost

Making sense of sexual swings

Is your sexual preference only a result of your genes or do environment and culture also influence it?

This time for Odisha: Hockey World Cup, investments surge. And culture?

In this 2-part series, Charudutta Panigrahi talks about what Odisha should do this year to march ahead on social development

‘Workers must have a right to digitally disconnect’

The Global Commission on the Future of Work calls for new sets of regulations and rights in digital work era

The Tiger in Tamilakam

The striped big cat of Asia occupied a unique place in the psyche and ethical consciousness of the ancient Tamils, something which continues to …