Mood: How the Lounge team is feeling this week

Triple double threat

At 22, Simone Biles is the most decorated US gymnast ever, and on a shortlist of the best in history. Her performance at the 2016 Olympics was so commanding that her four golds seemed almost inevitable. Last week, at the US Gymnastics Championships, she scaled a new peak, with the first “triple double”—a triple-twisting double somersault on floor exercise—ever by a female gymnast. At the same event, Biles also became the first woman to land “a double-twisting, double somersault dismount off the balance beam”. —UB

Shaha at the helm

The Indian National Science Academy (Insa) will be headed by a woman for the first time in its 85-year-old history. Chandrima Shaha, 66, will take over as president in January 2020. The biologist, who was previously vice-president, Insa, and director, National Institute of Immunology, Delhi, will head the 30-member council that will take over next year. Shaha’s fields of research include cell biology and biochemistry and she joins an illustrious list of Insa presidents that includes the likes of Homi J. Bhabha and Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis. According to a recent National Task Force report on women in science, women make up only 15% of the Indian R&D (research and development) workforce. But Shaha’s appointment marks yet another impressive milestone after Gagandeep Kang’s induction as an elected fellow of The Royal Society and Ritu Karidhal’s leading role in the Chandrayaan-2 mission. —NS

Harking for Hampi

Visuals of Hampi being inundated emerged earlier this week, and around 365 tourists were evacuated from the erstwhile capital of Vijayanagar by rescue teams. About 135km away, yet another Unesco World heritage site—Pattadakal—submerged in the waters of the Malaprabha river. This series of monuments was built in the seventh and eighth centuries by the Chalukya dynasty and has been described on the Unesco website as “the high point of an eclectic art”. These two incidents raise serious questions about the effect of climate change on heritage monuments, and whether we have even begun to think of a road map to protect them against the resulting natural disasters, in this case, annual seasonal floods. —AB

Pride without prejudice

Mumbai’s LGBTQ+ non-profit The Humsafar Trust released a national anthem video, #StandWithPride, on Independence Day. It features activists Ashok Row Kavi and Anjali Gopalan, film-makers Onir and Sridhar Rangayan, the late activist Siddharth Gautam and the late film-maker Riyad Wadia, among others. These activists played a crucial role in the struggle against IPC’s Section 377, which was ultimately repealed in September last year. The minute-and-a-half-long video celebrates this Independence Day as the community’s first since the ruling. It was played in PVR cinemas on 15 August, across 280 screens in eight metro cities. —SL