Daily Gyan

In the savannahs of Kenya, two female northern white rhinos, Nájin and Fatu, munch contentedly on the grass. At the time of this video’s publication, these are the last two known northern white rhinos left on Earth.  Their species is functionally extinct— without a male, Nájin and Fatu can’t reproduce. And yet, there’s still hope to revive the northern white rhino. How can that be? The story starts about 50 years ago, when poachers began illegally hunting thousands of rhinos across Africa for their horns. This, combined with civil wars in their territory, decimated northern white rhino populations. Concerned conservationists began trying to breed them in captivity in the 1970s, collecting and storing semen from males. Only four rhinos were ultimately born through the ambitious breeding program. Nájin, and her daughter Fatu were the last two. In 2014, conservationists discovered that neither can have a calf. Though Nájin gave birth to Fatu, she now has weak hindlegs, which could har...

After 12 years living in California, Chinese citizen Chae Chan Pingwas ready for a visit home. He procured the necessary documents for his departure and return journey, and set sail for China, where he spent the next year reconnecting with friends and family.  But when he returned to San Francisco on October 8th, 1888, Ping and his fellow immigrant passengers were forbidden to disembark. Just days earlier, President Grover Cleveland had signed the Scott Act, which invalidated the legal documents allowing their re-entry to the United States. This policy threatened to separate families and deprive Chinese immigrants of their homes and livelihoods. Ping challenged the ruling, beginning a legal battle for the rights of thousands of Chinese immigrants. But his case inspired an even more controversial policy that continues to impact immigrants around the globe.  Discrimination against Chinese immigrants had begun decades earlier, when the California Gold Rush created a massive ...

Princess Savitri of the Madra Kingdom was as benevolent, brilliant, and bright as the Sun God she was named for. Her grace was known throughout the land, and many powerful princes and wealthy merchants flocked to her family’s palace to seek her hand in marriage.  But upon witnessing her blinding splendor in person, the men lost their nerve. Unimpressed with these suitors, the princess determined to find a husband herself. Mounting her golden chariot, she travelled through rolling deserts, glittering cities and snow-capped mountains— rejecting many men along the way. Eventually, Savitri ventured deep into the jungle, where she met a young man chopping wood. His name was Satyavan, and like her, he loved the tranquil forest— but the princess saw he was not at peace. After talking for hours, Satyavan told her of his plight. His parents had once been wealthy rulers, until his father was blinded and overthrown in a violent coup.  Now Satyavan worked tirelessly to support their meag...

In the world of math, many strange results are possible when we change the rules. But there’s one rule that most of us have been warned not to break: don’t divide by zero. How can the simple combination of an everyday number and a basic operation cause such problem?                                      Normally, dividing by smaller and smaller numbers gives you bigger and bigger answers. Ten divided by two is five, by one is ten, by one-millionth is 10 million, and so on. So it seems like if you divide by numbers that keep shrinking all the way down to zero, the answer will grow to the largest thing possible. Then, isn’t the answer to 10 divided by zero actually infinity? That may sound plausible. But all we really know is that if we divide 10 by a number that tends towards zero, the answer tends towards infinity. And that’s not the same thing assaying that 10 di...

In Warsaw, late October 1943, Irena Sendler and Janina Grabowska were enjoying a rare moment of peace in their war-torn city. But their laughter froze when they heard the Gestapo pounding on Sendler’s door. Sendler rushed to the window to dispose of incriminating evidence— only to see more police patrolling below. Knowing she was minutes from arrest, she tossed Janina her most dangerous possession: a glass jar containing the names of over 2,000 Jewish children she’d smuggled to safety. This arrest wasn’t the first consequence Sendler had faced in her lifelong crusade against anti-Semitism. Born to Catholic parents in 1910,she grew up in a predominantly Jewish town where her father treated poor Jewish patients other doctors refused to help. Irena was furious at the constant discrimination against her Jewish friends.  As a graduate student in social welfare at the University of Warsaw, Sendler publicly denounced the segregation of classrooms and defaced her non-Jewish identity card— ...

In August 1947, India gained independence after 200 years of British rule. What followed was one of the largest and bloodiest forced migrations in history. An estimated one million people lost their lives. Before British colonization, the Indian subcontinent was a patchwork of regional kingdoms known as princely states populated by Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Christians, Parsis, and Jews .                                Each princely state had its own traditions, caste backgrounds, and leadership. Starting in the 1500s, a series of European powers colonized India with coastal trading settlements. By the mid-18th century, the English East India Company emerged as the primary colonial power in India. The British ruled some provinces directly, and ruled the princely states indirectly. Under indirect rule, the princely states remained sovereign but made political and financial concessions to the Br...

The king tries to retreat, but enemy cavalry flanks him from the rear. Escape is impossible. But this isn’t a real war– nor is it just a game. Over the roughly one-and-a-half millennia of its existence, chess has been known as a tool of military strategy, a metaphor for human affairs, and a benchmark of genius. While our earliest records of chess are in the 7th century, legend tells that the game’s origins lie a century earlier. Supposedly, when the youngest prince of the Gupta Empire was killed in battle, his brother devised a way of representing the scene to their grieving mother. Set on the 8x8 ashtapada board used for other popular pastimes, a new game emerged with two key features: different rules for moving different types of pieces, and a single king piece whose fate determined the outcome. The game was originally known as chaturanga– a Sanskrit word for "four divisions." But with its spread to Sassanid Persia, it acquired its current name and termino...