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Gayathri Vaidyanathan

Gayathri writes about science, tech and environment. Her print and audio work has appeared in Nature, Discover, the Washington Post, Undark, the New York Times, the BBC and other publications. She makes a podcast, Scrolls & Leaves, an award-winning world history podcast that decolonizes history and science.

She was a staff reporter for Washington, DC-based E&E News (now Politico) for many years. She has written magazine stories from India, Liberia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and other places.

In 2020, she got the British Association of Science Writer’s feature award for this story. In 2019,  she was part of the team that received the 2019 George Polk Award for the environment. In 2014, she received an award from the Society for Professional Journalists and in 2012, from the National Association of Science Writers. She’s received many fellowships. She is a grantee of the National Geographic Society.

She has a master’s from Columbia University and a bachelor’s in biochemistry from McMaster University in Ontario. She did lab research for a year. She’s based in Bangalore.

Email: gaya dot nathan07 at gmail

Every step you take

Asignificant number of college grads find themselves trapped on the virtual shop-floors of the data economy, stuck to their laptops and smartphones, performing a series of repetitive tasks in what appears to be the digital iteration of an assembly line. 

(Huffington Post)

What humanity should eat to stay healthy and save the planet

 More than 2 billion people are overweight or obese, mostly in the Western world. At the same time, 811 million people are not getting enough calories or nutrition, mostly in low- and middle-income nations

(Nature)

Searching for the Human Age

 

(Discover)

India's Coal Habit

Coal is the bane of Jharkhand, and the reason why Kumar and his fellow residents need to move out of the town. If the government has its way, 17 open-pit mining complexes will be built here. Below the town lie 19 seams of prime coking coal. The government’s goal is to get at the coal before the fire does.

(ClimateWire; NYT)

Tigers in trouble

(Nature)

The wheat stalker

David Cheruiyot noticed that his wheat fields were turning the wrong colour. The stems of the plants took on a sickly brown hue, and when he peeled open the heads there was no grain inside. “If you go to inspect it, there is nothing but dust,” he recalls.

(Nature)

Silencing India's Critics (audio)

Police say they’ve uncovered a plot that implicates some of India’s most distinguished lawyers, intellectuals, and activists in a conspiracy to bring down the government. The story of BK-16.

(Coda / Audible)

The world’s species are playing musical chairs: how will it end?

Something odd is going on in biodiversity studies. Scientists have long warned that animal and plant species are disappearing at an alarming rate…

(Nature)

Women bear the burden of pandemics

(Undark)

Gasping for air in India's industrial north

Air pollution kills one million Indians annually. Residents of the ancient city of Patna know the problem all too well. In 2017, concentrations of PM2.5 — the most dangerous type of particulate pollution — in Patna’s busiest streets met Indian air quality standards only 81 out of the 311 days that were monitored. 

(Undark)

Hidden in plain sight (audio)

India is the world’s largest importer of palm oil. The commodity is widely used as a cooking oil and in low-income households, and in the production of processed foods.

(China Dialogue)

Could a Century-Old TB Shot Protect Against Other Respiratory Diseases?

Many scientists now believe that BCG and some vaccines like it that contain a live, weakened virus may act against non-target diseases.

(Wired)

Death on the gas field illustrates high risks of the rush to drill

(E&E News)

A saga of indenture

The story of the late Dr. Brij Lal, a historian of the Indo-Pacific, and his study of the Girmitiyas, or the Indian indentured labourers of Fiji

(Scrolls & leaves)

Gorilla Populations Need More Human Interference

Primatologist Peter Walsh has a new approach to gorilla welfare: He placed a black plastic belt featuring a VHF transmitter around the ankle of Kelle, a 16-year-old male gorilla. Kelle, who lives in a cage in the Congo, will eventually be “reintroduced” to the wild. 

(Discover Magazine)

Seeking long-lived mammals

In all of Earth’s history, which species of mammal survived for the longest time?

Benjamin Burger, a paleontologist at Utah State University, has come up with two candidates that could not be more different.

(Washington Post)

An Indian PSU Has Come Up With The Scariest COVID-19 Tracking Idea Yet
State-owned BECIL put out an Expression of Interest to build a wristband to snoop on every single aspect of a quarantined coronavirus patient. More than a hundred companies said they could do it.
(Huffington Post)
A message in a bacterium
For more than a decade, Christian Bök has been toiling on a book of poems. But his is not the typical authorial angst: Bök intends his poems to outlast human civilization, and indeed the planet itself. 
(PNAS)
Exposing a small part of a forest to the ‘threatening’ heat of 2100

A first-of-its-kind experiment where scientists are cranking up the heat by 4 degrees Celsius —  as hot as our planet may be in 2100 if nations emit carbon dioxide at present-day rates.

(ClimateWire)

Dam controversy: Remaking the Mekong

 The lower Mekong is one of the last big untamed rivers in the world. If the Xayaburi dam is built, it will set a precedent for 10 other hydropower dams on the river’s mainstem.

(Nature)

Debt drives farmers to suicide in India (audio)

(DW)

The Cultured Chimpanzee

Chimpanzees in the wild are notoriously difficult to study because they flee from humans — with good reason. Bushmeat hunting and human respiratory diseases have decimated chimpanzee populations1, while logging and mining have wiped out their habitat. 

(Nature)

Kurdish hoop dreams (audio)

Diyarbakir has been at the centre of a conflict between the Turkish state and Kurdish rebels. There are few opportunities for the youth of the city. But one man has devoted years to changing that, through basketball

(DW)

Gig-work: A Pandemic of Discontent

The government called gig workers frontline workers; companies called them “heroes”. But the company was slowly replacing human managers with algorithms and digital systems. 

(The Wire)