According to Biplab Deb, the chief minister of Tripura, the oxygen content of water will increase if ducks swim in it. [ Satire begins here ] This is a sensational new discovery that has drastic imp…
Do all editors share that excoriating sensation that carves through one’s gut when one sees one’s writer writing for another publication? Of course, “one’s writer” is unjust phrasing because writers…
There's only one absolute zero but there are multiple absolute 'hots', depending on the temperature at which various theories of physics break down. This is an interesting conception becau…
I asked a friend earlier today if he would be interested in explaining the observation of Lyman-alpha lines in anti-hydrogen to an audience of high-schoolers.But will high-schoolers ever be able to un…
Donald Trump When you criticise a person, you naturally take into account their office and assess whether you know all that you need to to come to your conclusions. For a long time, this 'stop a…
Chennai is my favourite city to land in an airplane over. The runway at its Meenambakkam Airport is oriented such that planes often have to land after manoeuvring themselves over the Bay of Bengal, a…
The ISRO homepage has been hijacked by an almost-full-page banner soliciting readers' comments about Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Independence Day speech. A friend was understandably irked b…
We are convinced that if we are to play a meaningful role nationally, and in the community of nations, we must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the real problems of man…
TL;DR – Journalists are already more accountable than the publishers of scientific journals are. If scientists find journalistic review of the scientific literature to be lacking, help them improve in…
I just got to Delhi from Bangalore. The sendoff in the latter city was great: the skies were overcast, with a darker, wetter layer of clouds looming at the zenith, set at snail's pace by a strong…
The new content editor in the Ghost CMS, named Koenig, is quite good, a much smoother use than WordPress's new Gutenberg. Ghost's latest iteration in v1.25.3 (as of today) has a full-screen mi…
I just spent the weekend at Sunti koppa, a small village to the northwest of Mysore, in Kodagu, a.k.a. Coorg, district. I was there with my relatives – six of us in all – and we were put up at a homes…