In Vox’s ‘explained’ Netflix series, an episode dissecting the gender pay gap highlights a disturbing phenomenon: much of the differences in pay between genders are attributable to our widely held stereotypes and beliefs. Hilary Clinton makes a striking example: if you are a man, you should decorate your workspace with pictures of your children, so that you are seen as a committed father. But if you are a woman, you should not do this, as the perception will be that you can’t keep your mind on the work at hand.

The COVID19 pandemic has unearthed a number of damaging societal…

On the 31st of December 2019, a cluster of pneumonia cases was reported in Wuhan, China. A novel coronavirus strain, which we now know as SARS-CoV-2, was eventually identified as the agent causing these pneumonia cases: a respiratory disease we now know as COVID-19. With a new disease comes new questions: What is the disease course? Do we have a working vaccine? What can we use to cure it?

Yet one thing about the SARS-CoV-2 quickly became apparent: its lipid envelope is no match for alcohol based sanitisers. Initial reports also speculated that the sun and higher temperatures inactivate SARS-CoV-2…

In the wake of #BlackOutTuesday, a global social media effort involving uploading a black square to your profile, questions have been raised surrounding the sincerity of some efforts. Enter Virtue Signalling: the action of posting about relevant social justice movements in a bid to prove that you are concerned, when you really aren’t, or otherwise do not make any other concerted efforts at addressing the problem.

From the context in which this term has been used, it seems that it has taken root in a dislike for oversharing: sharing all the details in your life that people don’t need to…

Sometimes, I wonder how Shasta is holding up.

Shasta is the name my dissection group chose for our cadaver, a name that’s supposed to symbolise that she is s teacher who has donated the physical aspect of her being for us to learn from. Sitting behind a computer, many miles away, doing a virtual dissection, I cast my mind

back to the times earlier in the year: standing around Shasta, discussing the same muscle on end, and making the occasional foray to my friends' dissection groups.

I find myself in a very different world now.

Across the globe, lockdowns and…

I think I would call myself a headline addict.

Addict, to indicate that there are points where my scrolling through headlines has become mindless. Not a search of the latest, greatest and most important, but a habit of opening the news app as an in-betweener. In between classes, for instance. At a stage, in between sets. In between stages of sleep at 3am.

With coronavirus killing people and infecting more each day, most headlines are dominated by its effects, the scientific advances to address it, or the politics and economics surrounding it.

But I can't help but wonder: exactly what…

Written in conjunction with: Dr S.H. Vilane

Coronaviruses were first described in poultry in the 1930’s, causing respiratory, gut, liver and neurological diseases in animals. 7 Coronaviruses are known to cause disease in humans: 4 most frequently cause symptoms of the common cold, with the remaining 3 causing severe and sometimes fatal respiratory failure in humans. These have caused major outbreaks of deadly pneumonia in the 21st century:

1. SARS-CoV-2 is the cause of the COVID-19 disease which began in Wuhan, China in late 2019.
2. MERS-CoV is a betacoronavirus that caused for the 2012 MERS outbreak. …

Above: an actress emulating Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, who told hungry peasants to ‘eat cake’

There is a certain time during your country’s lockdown (or social distancing measures) when it no longer crosses your mind that you’re living during a pandemic. Some people describe this moment as ‘surreal’: while we hang on in our little enclaves, figuring out which Netflix show to binge next, there is a war against an invisible agent outside. A war that it seems we only have to fight when we stand in supermarket lines, 6 feet apart from each other.

I don’t think we…

As I scroll through my YouTube recommendations, a video from Cambridge University pops up: ‘Spanish Flu: a warning from history’. I can’t shake the ominous feeling that hangs in the room when I notice that it was posted a year ago. Of late, a lot of people are telling us that we should have known, the same way we often conceptualise most courses of natural death. Even if we see it coming, it catches us unaware.

For all the grief and surprise it bears, death has become a surprisingly normal installment of the day of late. Everyday, there are statistics…