Imrul Hasan, Author at Revlox

Thanatology: The Science of Death—and What It Reveals About Being Human

2Jan

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Thanatology: The Science of Death—and What It Reveals About Being Human

Death is the most universal human experience and, paradoxically, the one we talk about the least. Every culture builds myths around it, every religion offers explanations, and every individual feels its shadow—yet modern society often treats death as a failure, a taboo, or something to be hidden behind hospital curtains and euphemisms. Thanatology exists precisely because of this discomfort. It is the formal study of death, dying, and the psychological, social, cultural, and biological processes that surround them. Far from being morbid, thanatology is one of the most human-centered disciplines in science and the humanities. It does not ask only how people die, but how they live knowing they will. It examines grief, fear, acceptance, rituals, medical ethics, end-of-life care, and the mean...

Life After Life: How Raymond Moody Changed the Way the World Thinks About Death

2Jan

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Books, Spirituality

Life After Life: How Raymond Moody Changed the Way the World Thinks About Death

Long before near-death experiences became viral stories or late-night podcast topics, death was treated in Western medicine as a hard stop. The heart stops, the brain shuts down, consciousness ends. Anything reported beyond that line was dismissed as hallucination, wishful thinking, or the brain’s final misfire. Then a quiet philosophy professor with medical training did something radical: he listened. His name was Raymond Moody, and in 1975 he published a book that permanently altered the global conversation about dying, consciousness, and the possibility of an afterlife. That book was Life After Life—and its impact has never fully faded. Moody did not set out to prove heaven. He didn’t preach religion or claim certainty. Instead, he documented something medicine had largely ignored: c...

Digital Whitewashing: How the Internet Sanitizes Power, History, and Reality

2Jan

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Internet

Digital Whitewashing: How the Internet Sanitizes Power, History, and Reality

In the physical world, whitewashing is easy to spot. Paint over cracks. Cover stains. Smooth rough surfaces until the past disappears beneath a clean, acceptable layer. In the digital world, whitewashing is far more subtle—and far more powerful. Digital whitewashing is the process by which uncomfortable truths, controversial histories, harmful behaviors, or systemic injustices are quietly minimized, reframed, buried, or algorithmically erased in online spaces. It doesn’t always involve deleting information. Often, it works by controlling visibility, shaping narratives, and amplifying some voices while muting others. The result is a version of reality that looks clean, reasonable, and harmless—while leaving out the parts that explain how power actually operates. What Digital Whit...

The Angelic Tongue of Enoch: The Language Said to Precede Humanity

2Jan

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Myths

The Angelic Tongue of Enoch: The Language Said to Precede Humanity

Among all mystical languages ever recorded, none occupies a stranger position than Enochian. It is not ancient in the archaeological sense, nor purely fictional in the literary sense. It does not emerge from folklore, tribal memory, or gradual linguistic evolution. Instead, it appears abruptly in the late 16th century—fully formed, grammatical, and systematic—claimed to be dictated by angels. Supporters believe it is the original language of creation, spoken before human speech fractured into nations and tongues. Skeptics call it a brilliant esoteric construction. Yet even critics admit one thing: Enochian is unlike any invented language before or since. To understand why it still fascinates scholars, occultists, linguists, and psychologists alike, we have to begin with two men standing ...

Why Raising a Daughter Often Costs More Than Raising a Son—and What Society Rarely Admits About It

2Jan

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Culture

Why Raising a Daughter Often Costs More Than Raising a Son—and What Society Rarely Admits About It

For many parents, the idea that raising a daughter costs more than raising a son sounds uncomfortable, even controversial. Love, after all, is supposed to be equal. Children are priceless. Putting numbers next to parenting can feel cold or unfair. And yet, economic research keeps pointing to the same conclusion: the cost gap between raising sons and daughters begins early and quietly compounds over time. What makes this finding important is not the money itself, but what it reveals about society. The extra cost is not driven by biology or ability. It is driven by expectation—what girls are subtly and overtly required to be, wear, learn, and present to the world from a very young age. When economists study household spending patterns, they are not measuring affection. They are measuring p...

When Acting Disappears: How Viggo Mortensen Became Aragorn

2Jan

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Hollywood, Movies

When Acting Disappears: How Viggo Mortensen Became Aragorn

There are performances that impress, performances that convince, and then there are performances that seem to erase the line between actor and character entirely. What Viggo Mortensen achieved during the filming of The Lord of the Rings belongs to the last category. It wasn’t method acting in the theatrical sense, nor was it a publicity-crafted myth. It was something quieter, more physical, more total. Over the course of three films shot deep in New Zealand’s wilderness, Mortensen didn’t simply play Aragorn. He lived as him. Long before audiences met the Ranger of the North on screen, Mortensen had already decided something unusual. He would not treat Aragorn as a costume he put on between takes. He would treat him as a man who existed—who walked, trained, slept, ate, bled, and endured th...

Loneliness Is as Deadly as Smoking 15 Cigarettes a Day — The Silent Public Health Crisis of Our Time

2Jan

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Mental Health

Loneliness Is as Deadly as Smoking 15 Cigarettes a Day — The Silent Public Health Crisis of Our Time

Loneliness is often treated as an emotional inconvenience, a temporary sadness, or a personal failing that can be solved by “putting yourself out there.” But modern science has stripped away that comforting illusion. Chronic loneliness is not a feeling problem. It is a biological threat—one powerful enough that global health authorities now place it alongside smoking, heart disease, and obesity. The World Health Organization has officially recognized chronic loneliness as a global public health crisis. In the United States, the Surgeon General issued a warning that startled even medical professionals: the mortality impact of long-term social isolation is comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes per day. This is not metaphorical language. It is a statistical comparison grounded in decades of ep...

Breathing Without Lungs: The Medical Breakthrough That Sounds Absurd—But Is Quietly Saving Lives

25Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Medical Science

Breathing Without Lungs: The Medical Breakthrough That Sounds Absurd—But Is Quietly Saving Lives

At first glance, it sounds like science fiction. Or worse, internet nonsense. The idea that humans could absorb oxygen through their intestines feels like a misunderstanding of basic biology, the kind of claim you expect to collapse under even mild scrutiny. And yet, it didn’t collapse. It passed animal trials. It passed human trials. And in carefully controlled clinical settings, it has already kept people alive when their lungs could not. What scientists have done is not replace breathing—but they have created something unprecedented: a biological backup system for oxygen delivery, one that bypasses the lungs entirely. This is not a gimmick. It is a serious medical advance with profound implications for critical care, emergency medicine, and the limits of human physiology. ...

Light, Not Drugs: The Radical Cancer Breakthrough That Turns Physics into a Weapon

25Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Medical Science, Science, World News

Light, Not Drugs: The Radical Cancer Breakthrough That Turns Physics into a Weapon

For over a century, cancer treatment has followed a familiar pattern. Poison the cancer faster than the body. Cut it out if possible. Burn it with radiation. Refine the chemistry, reduce the side effects, target the molecules more precisely—but the underlying logic remains the same: kill cancer with substances that are, by nature, toxic. Now, a discovery that sounds almost too clean to be real is forcing scientists to rethink that logic entirely. No drugs. No chemotherapy cocktails. No genetic manipulation. Just light. Researchers have developed a technique so unconventional it borders on surreal: using near-infrared light to vibrate molecules inside cancer cells so violently that the cells physically tear themselves apart. The method has been nicknamed the “molecular jackhammer.” An...

The Encyclopedic Novel: Literature’s Most Ambitious and Impossible Form

19Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

literature

The Encyclopedic Novel: Literature’s Most Ambitious and Impossible Form

Few terms in literary studies carry as much weight, mystery, and intellectual ambition as the phrase “encyclopedic novel.” It is a genre that does not merely tell a story — it attempts to contain worlds. A form so vast and intricate that it tries, in one sweeping narrative, to capture the full range of human knowledge, history, science, culture, psychology, philosophy, technology, and myth. To read one is to step inside a gigantic organism. To write one is to wrestle with the very limits of language. The encyclopedic novel is not just a long book. It is a totalizing work — a novel that behaves like an archive, a philosophical treatise, a scientific manual, a poetic text, and a historical document all at once. Its ambition is not just to entertain but to encompass. To gather the pieces of ...

Humans and Dinosaurs: Could They Ever Have Coexisted, or Is It a Story We Want to Believe?

19Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Mystery, World

Humans and Dinosaurs: Could They Ever Have Coexisted, or Is It a Story We Want to Believe?

Few ideas grip the human imagination as tightly as the possibility that humans and dinosaurs once walked the Earth together. It appears everywhere—ancient carvings, religious interpretations, viral documentaries, fringe archaeology, and even childhood fantasies of spears facing towering reptiles. The image feels powerful, almost instinctive: humanity standing eye-to-eye with creatures that symbolize raw, prehistoric dominance. Yet mainstream science insists this never happened. According to the established timeline, dinosaurs went extinct roughly 66 million years ago, while anatomically modern humans appeared around 300,000 years ago. Between them stretches a gulf so vast it dwarfs recorded history. And still, the question refuses to die. Why does the idea persist? Is it pure myth, misi...

The Fourth Turning: Why History Repeats in Cycles—and Why the Next Crisis Was Never a Surprise

19Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Books, World

The Fourth Turning: Why History Repeats in Cycles—and Why the Next Crisis Was Never a Surprise

History does not move forward in a straight line. It breathes. It contracts and expands. It builds, stabilizes, decays, and then violently renews itself. This unsettling idea sits at the heart of The Fourth Turning, the influential and controversial book by William Strauss and Neil Howe that argues modern history follows a recurring generational cycle—one that inevitably ends in crisis. According to the authors, societies do not simply progress. They rotate through predictable phases driven by generational psychology. Roughly every 80 to 100 years—about the length of a long human life—civilizations enter a period of upheaval so profound that it reshapes institutions, values, power structures, and collective identity. These periods are not accidents. They are structural resets. And if Str...

“Breakfast Is the Most Important Meal of the Day”: Science, Psychology, and the Marketing Myth That Shaped How the World Eats

19Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Culture, Lifestyle

“Breakfast Is the Most Important Meal of the Day”: Science, Psychology, and the Marketing Myth That Shaped How the World Eats

For more than a century, one sentence has quietly governed mornings across the globe: Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It appears in school textbooks, health campaigns, cereal commercials, hospital pamphlets, and parental advice passed down like unquestioned wisdom. Skip breakfast and you’re told your metabolism will slow, your brain will fog, your weight will spiral, and your productivity will collapse. But here’s the uncomfortable truth modern science keeps circling back to: that statement did not come from nutrition science. It came from marketing. That does not mean breakfast is useless. It means the certainty surrounding it was manufactured long before evidence arrived. And once an idea embeds itself into culture, it becomes very difficult to separate habit from fact...

The Nuclear Device Lost in the Himalayas: A Cold War Secret Still Buried Above the Ganga

17Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

History, World

The Nuclear Device Lost in the Himalayas: A Cold War Secret Still Buried Above the Ganga

High in the Indian Himalayas, where rock gives way to ice and human presence thins into myth, a Cold War secret may still lie entombed beneath glaciers. It is not a legend from antiquity or a rumor born of folklore. It is a documented operation involving the CIA, India’s Intelligence Bureau, and a nuclear-powered surveillance device that vanished in 1965 on the slopes of Nanda Devi, India’s second-highest mountain. More than sixty years later, no one knows exactly where it went. And as glaciers retreat under accelerating climate change, the question that once belonged to geopolitics is quietly becoming an environmental one: what happens if a nuclear-powered device resurfaces above one of the world’s most sacred river systems? To understand why this story still matters, one must step bac...

“The Conqueror” (1956): How One Hollywood Film Became a Silent Tragedy of Radiation, Denial, and Deadly Consequences

17Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Crime, History, Hollywood, Movies, Weird World

“The Conqueror” (1956): How One Hollywood Film Became a Silent Tragedy of Radiation, Denial, and Deadly Consequences

In 1956, Hollywood released The Conqueror, a lavish historical epic starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan. On the surface, it was just another mid-century studio production—expensive sets, sweeping desert landscapes, and the confident belief that spectacle alone could carry a film to success. What no one acknowledged publicly at the time, and what would take decades to fully understand, was that The Conqueror would become one of the darkest cautionary tales in film history. Not because of its artistic failure, but because of what it did to the people who made it. Over the following decades, an unusually high number of cast and crew members developed cancer. Many died young. The pattern was so striking that it could not be dismissed as coincidence. At the center of the controversy was a grim...

RTLM and Rwanda: How a Radio Station Helped Kill a Nation While the World Listened and Did Nothing

16Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Crime, History

RTLM and Rwanda: How a Radio Station Helped Kill a Nation While the World Listened and Did Nothing

In 1994, nearly 800,000 people were murdered in Rwanda in just about one hundred days. Most were Tutsi. Many were moderate Hutu. They were hacked to death with machetes, beaten with clubs, shot, burned, hunted in churches and schools where they believed they were safe. It was one of the fastest, most efficient genocides in human history. And much of it was organized, directed, and energized not by secret military orders or shadowy conspiracies—but by a radio station. Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, known as RTLM, did not simply report the genocide. It helped create it. To understand Rwanda in 1994, you must understand RTLM. And to understand RTLM, you must confront one of the most damning truths of modern history: the genocide was not inevitable, and the world did not fail be...

When the Body Turns Off Pain: The Hidden Survival Mechanism That Makes Humans Extraordinary

14Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Health

When the Body Turns Off Pain: The Hidden Survival Mechanism That Makes Humans Extraordinary

Pain is one of the most fundamental human sensations. It protects us, warns us, slows us down, and signals when something in the body has gone wrong. And yet, under certain circumstances, the human body can do something astonishing—something that seems almost supernatural: it can shut pain off completely. Not reduce it. Not dull it. Completely override it. This isn’t magic. It isn’t adrenaline bravado. It isn’t denial, delusion, or emotional distraction. It is biology. It is evolution. It is the brilliance of the human brain stepping in during life-threatening moments, making a split-second decision that survival matters more than sensation. This phenomenon—often called stress-induced analgesia or “pain immunity”—is one of the clearest examples of how the human organism prioritizes life a...

Bhutan: The Quiet Revolution of a Carbon-Negative Kingdom

14Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Nature, World

Bhutan: The Quiet Revolution of a Carbon-Negative Kingdom

In a world obsessed with growth charts, GDP rankings, and relentless consumption, Bhutan feels almost unreal. Tucked between the towering Himalayas, this small, landlocked nation has achieved something the rest of the world still treats as a distant aspiration: it absorbs more carbon dioxide than it emits. While global summits debate emission targets decades into the future, Bhutan already lives in that future. It is, quite literally, the world’s only carbon-negative country — and it achieved this not through technological obsession or economic dominance, but through philosophy, restraint, and an unusually deep respect for nature. Bhutan’s carbon-negative status is not a marketing slogan or a temporary statistical anomaly. It is the result of decades of deliberate choices rooted in cultur...

Sydney Sweeney, Truth, and the Modern Obsession With Women’s Bodies: Why One Lie Detector Moment Says More Than It Seems

14Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Beauty, Humor

Sydney Sweeney, Truth, and the Modern Obsession With Women’s Bodies: Why One Lie Detector Moment Says More Than It Seems

In the age of constant visibility, where every frame of a woman’s body can be zoomed, slowed, compared, and dissected by millions of strangers, it takes very little for a casual moment to turn into a cultural event. That is exactly what happened when Sydney Sweeney, the 28-year-old actress whose rise has been swift, scrutinized, and endlessly discussed, sat down next to her The Housemaid co-star Amanda Seyfried for Vanity Fair’s iconic lie detector series. What began as playful banter between two accomplished actresses quickly evolved into something far more revealing—not about anatomy, but about the pressure placed on women who exist in the public eye. The video, published on December 11, was designed to be bold. Vanity Fair’s lie detector format thrives on the promise that nothing is of...

The Ariel School UFO Incident: The Day 62 Children in Zimbabwe Told the Same Impossible Story

14Dec

By Imrul HasanNo Comments

Mystery

The Ariel School UFO Incident: The Day 62 Children in Zimbabwe Told the Same Impossible Story

On the morning of September 16, 1994, something extraordinary happened in a quiet suburb outside Harare, Zimbabwe. It did not involve radar failures, military jets, or classified government documents. There were no scientists in lab coats, no politicians at podiums, no dramatic press conferences. Instead, the witnesses were children — dozens of them — playing on a schoolyard during morning recess. And what they reported seeing that day would become one of the most disturbing, debated, and enduring UFO cases in modern history. At Ariel School in Ruwa, a private primary school serving mostly middle-class families, 62 children independently described encountering a strange craft and non-human beings. Their accounts were recorded immediately, repeatedly, and over time. They were interviewed b...