Land on the moon, feet on the earth
Yesterday was fantastic. India made a few kinds of history, when one is great enough, by autonomously landing a robotic instrument in the moon's south polar region. Some seven hours later, it depl…
VM
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Landing Day
1 min read
Good luck, Chandrayaan 3. Good luck also to all the journalists covering this event from within India – a unique location because it's where you will feel the most excitement today about the missi…
Making sense of Luna 25
2 min read
At the outset, let's hope the unfortunate demise of Russia's Luna 25 mission to the moon will finally silence the social media brigade that's been calling it a competitor to India's Ch…
A lotus for Modi, with love from Manipur
3 min read
This bit of news is so chock full of metaphors that I'm almost laughing out loud. Annotated excerpts from 'CSIR’s new lotus variety ‘Namoh 108’ a ‘grand gift’ to PM Modi: Science Minister'…
The shadows of Chandrayaan 2
5 min read
When in September 2019 the surface component of the Chandrayaan 2 mission failed, with the 'Vikram' lander crashing on the moon's surface instead of gently touching down, there was a sense…
Is Dias bringing the bus back?
3 min read
So Physical Review Letters formally retracted that paper about manganese sulphide, in the limelight for having been coauthored by Ranga P. Dias, yesterday. The retraction notice states: "Of the a…
The value of ripeness
4 min read
Think of the long centuries in which attempts were made to change mercury into gold because that seemed like a very useful thing to do. These efforts failed and we found how to change mercury into gol…
What's with superconductors and peer-review?
7 min read
Throughout the time I've been a commissioning editor for science-related articles for news outlets, I've always sought and published articles about academic publishing. It's the part of th…
Review: 'Oppenheimer' (2023)
7 min read
Oppenheimer was great. I really liked it. I don't have a review as much as some notes that I took during the film that I'd like to share. But before diving into them, I should say that I got a…
Irritating Google Docs is irritating
2 min read
The backdrop of the shenanigans of ChatGPT, Bard and other artificial intelligence (AI) systems these days has only served to accentuate how increasingly frustrating working with Google Docs is. I use…
NYT's profile of India's space startup scene
3 min read
The New York Times published a 'profile' of the Indian spaceflight startup scene on July 4. The article is typical in that: a) by virtue of being published by one of the world's most-read…
A request to ISRO about Chandrayaan 3
4 min read
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has said its launch window for the Chandrayaan 3 mission is July 12-19. For now, the mission is expected to lift off on July 14 (at 2.35 pm IST). Chandray…