About
To the Core is a monthly publication about biochemistry, history and psychology, run by two students in Mumbai.
Each issue takes one subject and asks between six and eight questions about it. Every question becomes an article, and the question is the headline, so you know what a piece is going to answer before you start reading it.
Articles are written by students and commissioned for a particular issue, so the names change from month to month. Everyone is credited on their own piece.
The whole thing ran once before, as an email newsletter, and then stopped. Nothing of it was kept. There is no archive of that version and nothing to link back to. This one is built as an archive from the start, so that the fortieth issue is as easy to find as the first.
The editors
Naasha Mahadevia
Naasha is in the twelfth grade at the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai, and she has spent most of it on biochemistry, history and psychology, mostly refusing to treat them as three separate things. The overlap is the part she actually cares about.
She has curly hair and a loud laugh, usually at something nobody else has found funny yet. Talk to her for ten minutes and you will get from Rasputin to something extremely niche without noticing the turn. Make a reference you are certain will die on impact and she will get it.
She is the one who finishes things, which is rarer than it sounds. Most of the ideas people have at school stay ideas. She does it without ever appearing to try very hard, and she will hype you through your own work while she is at it.
Rhea Hiremath
Rhea is in the twelfth grade at the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai, and came to this through the same three subjects. Biochemistry, history and psychology, and a particular interest in what people do when all three land on them at once.
She is a dancer, and in most weeks she is in a ballet studio more than she is anywhere else.
She is also the one who notices. If someone in a group has gone quiet, Rhea has usually clocked it and asked before anybody else has looked up. She turns up with snacks and tissues without being asked to. Her humour is dry and arrives late, which is what makes it land.
She is not the loudest person in a room, and she has never needed to be.
What we are trying to do
Vitamin C is what lets your body hold collagen together. Take it away for a few months and the collagen stops being replaced, which means old scars come apart and teeth fall out of gums that were fine a year ago. On long voyages that killed more sailors than fighting did. The Royal Navy found the cure, wrote it down, adopted it, and then lost it again, because the explanation everybody believed for why it worked was wrong, so they kept swapping in things that should have worked by that explanation and did not.
That is one event. In school it is three subjects.
To the Core is for the questions that do not fit inside one of them. Biochemistry gives you the mechanism: what the molecule or the organism actually does. History gives you the consequence. Psychology gives you what it did to people, alone and in crowds. Most of our articles carry two of the three. A few carry all three.
The test we use is straightforward. Does answering this question mean crossing from one subject into another? "What does vitamin C do in the body?" is biology homework. "Why did a navy forget a cure it had already written down?" needs the vitamin and the institution in the same paragraph.
We write for people who are curious and do not have a science degree. That is not the same as writing simply. You should be able to read anything here start to finish without looking something up, and come out of it knowing how the thing actually worked rather than just that it mattered. We do not take the science out to make a piece easier. The science is the reason to read it.