Daily Gist

She was attacked at a rural police station, and her landmark case awakened India decades ago. But did she manage to love, have children, find happiness? New headlines about rape in my homeland set me on a journey to find her. She was 14, maybe 16, when they raped her. It was 1972, and I was 9. The India of her youth was the India of mine -- except she lived in utter poverty. She was an orphaned adivasi, a tribal girl, and she performed the most menial of jobs to put bread in her belly. She collected cow dung with her bare hands, shaped it into patties, slapped them on walls to dry and then sold them as fuel. It's a sight and smell familiar to me. I used to watch women in my Kolkata neighborhood do the same thing, using the back wall of my grandfather's house. I couldn't imagine plunging my hand into piles of animal waste. After it happened, she might as well have worn a scarlet letter on her chest. Such was the stigma of rape in India then. She was brave to speak out and di...

 The process begins with various behavioural interactions, such as snout rubbing and submissive displays. Once mutually satisfied, the male mounts the female, wrapping his tail and back legs around her. Mating occurs in water, where both male and female can be seen intertwined, submerging, and resurfacing. While the typical courtship routine may last hours, copulation is very short (usually less than 30 seconds). Once the females have mated several times for the season, they begin to build a nest from mud, plants, and sticks to lay their eggs. The morphology of crocodile spermatozoa was made up of acrosome, head, and tail which corresponded to (5.55±1.20) μm, (12.74±1.57) μm, and (70.67±4.40) μm, respectively. The total length of spermatozoa in estuarine crocodile was measured at (88.96±0.52) μm. In Florida Bay, the majority of nests are hole nests, with a few mound nests located mainly on islands. A single female typically lays a clutch of between 30 and 60 eggs that incubate for ...

Thomas Fuller was an African man who was sold into slavery in 1724 at the age of 14. He became famous for his amazing ability to solve difficult math problems in his head, earning him the nickname the "Virginia Calculator."  One day, someone asked him how many seconds there were in a year and a half. After thinking for only two minutes, he quickly answered, "47,304,000." Then, he was asked how many seconds a man had lived if he was 70 years, 17 days, and 12 hours old. Fuller answered in just a minute and a half, saying, "2,210,500,800." Another man, who was working the problem out on paper, said that Fuller’s answer was wrong and that it was actually much smaller. Fuller quickly responded, "Top, massa, you forget de leap year." Once they added in the leap year, the numbers matched exactly. Such a brilliant human, Africans are very 👍