IN July this year, the world is celebrating 200 years of Gregor Mendel's birth, widely accepted as the father of genetics. His experiments with peas, published in 1866 as Experiments in Plant Hybridisation, identified dominant and recessive traits and how recessive traits would reappear in future generations and in what proportion. Nevertheless, it was to lie unacknowledged and ignored till three other biologists replicated his work in 1900.

THE new Webb telescope has already shown that NASA's $10-billion investment and 26 years finally is delivering its promise: pictures of the cosmos at depth, in detail and quality far beyond what we currently have. The first set of images has captivated the general public, while the astrophysicists are drooling at the details and the spectra of the distant objects, telling us what they actually are.

THE UNAIDs executive director, Winnie Byanyima had appealed before the 12th WTO Ministerial of WTO in Geneva that the world would face a grim future if patent waivers did not take place. At a press conference, Byanyima had said, "In a pandemic, sharing technology is life or death, and we are choosing death," In the 12th Ministerial of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which ended on June 17th, the rich countries did precisely that. They blocked almost all possibilities of providing cheap vaccines, anti-virals and diagnostics for the world.

THE world has been facing a food crisis of a magnitude that has not been seen for many decades. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) has warned that "the number of people facing acute food insecurity and requiring urgent life-saving food assistance and livelihood support continues to grow at an alarming rate". While the crisis has been in the making for some time, it was precipitated by the economic sanctions US and EU have imposed on Belarus and Russia.

AFTER the relentless hype about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum, Solana, Dogecoin, LUNA, etc., for the last couple of years, we are now witnessing their complete meltdown. The hype was primarily driven by eye-popping increases in valuations of all the major cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin had gone from around USD 4,000 to USD 64,000, a sixteen fold increase, in 20 months.