Dead Thrice
Goralal Kori, a railway employee, was declared dead twice in a day before he actually died at a government hospital in Madhya Pradesh’s Vidisha where he was being treated for Covid. The 58-year-old’s son says a nurse told him on April 13 that his father’s condition worsened and he died. But another nurse told him two hours later that he was alive. Late in the evening, the family was informed that Kori died during a surgery to help him breathe. The next morning, the hospital issued the death certificate, but Kori’s family discovered him in a ward—alive. The family returned home, only to receive a call in the evening. This time the sad news was true.
Coronavirus The Bug
Kosovar biologist Halil Ibrahimi believes the pandemic restrictions haven’t all been bad—as a result of them, he completed his research, raised public awareness on the pollution of river basins and named a newly discovered insect after the virus. Ibrahimi, 44, had spent years working on a research report on a caddisfly species found in Kosovo’s western Bjeshket e Nemuna (Accursed Mountains) national park. That species now bears the name Potamophylax coronavirus. It is considerably smaller, and lives in a different habitat, in open, high-altitude zones, some 2,000 metres (6,500 feet) above sea level.
Cover Drive
The Great Unmasking has been postponed, at least for now, with the coronavirus showing new spikes. And so, masks are back in business. Even goddess Durga is wearing one in a temple in UP’s Etah, where priests distributed facial covers as ‘prasad’. Then there are those in tune with the season’s flavour—elections. Masks bearing the poll-catchy Jai Shri Ram are in great demand in the UP panchayat polls. From the divine to biotechnology—researchers at IIT, Mandi, have developed a virus-filtering, self-cleaning and antibacterial nano-material that can be used to make face covers and hazmat suits. There’s something for the mask-defying cavalier too: a Rs 1,000 fine in UP if caught without a mask and Rs 10,000 for a repeat offence. In Delhi, prison is an option—like this couple arrested for misbehaving with cops when they were stopped for the missing mask. Psst, the man told the cops that his wife does not wear one and won’t let him too.
Go And Die
Jaakar mar jaao (Go and die)” is not something one expects to hear from the person answering a distress call to a helpline. But that’s what Santosh Singh, son of a former chief of the BJP’s Lucknow unit, heard when he rang up the integrated Covid command centre of UP. Singh wrote to the CM about the helpline staff’s misbehaviour. He said four members of his family were sequestered at home after catching the infection and he called the helpline for help. A woman asked if he had downloaded the home isolation app and filled out the details. When he replied that no one told the family about that and no doctor had contacted them, the woman angrily retorted they should die.
The Otherworldly Lift
NASA’s experimental helicopter Ingenuity rose into the thin air above the dusty red surface of Mars on April 19, achieving the first powered flight by an aircraft on another planet. The triumph was hailed as a Wright Brothers moment. The mini 1.8-kg copter even carried a bit of wing fabric from the 1903 Wright Flyer. Ground controllers had to wait more than three excruciating hours before learning whether the pre-programmed flight had succeeded more than 287 million km away. It was a brief hop—just 39 seconds—but accomplished all the major milestones. To accomplish this, the helicopter’s twin, counter-rotating rotor blades needed to spin at 2,500 revolutions per minute—five times faster than on Earth. The Mars atmosphere is just 1 per cent the thickness of Earth’s.
Brevis
Illustrations: saahil, Text curated by Alka Gupta
