A tale of two awardees
In many respects Krishna Ella and Elon Musk are poles apart but on some they share a few similarities. Both of them have played along with nationalist elements in their respective national governments…
The HMPV cascade
I sense the public panic over the HMPV outbreak in China is finally dying down. I don’t know which TV news channel picked up on it first and blew it out of proportion but it created the sort of time i…
The HMPV cascade
I sense the public panic over the HMPV outbreak in China is finally dying down. I don’t know which TV news channel picked up on it first and blew it out of proportion but it created the sort of time i…
Rescuing superconductivity
From a paper in Nature Reviews Physics, December 19, 2024: One of the forefront fields of modern superconductivity research is that on hydrides at high pressures. Over the past few years, this resear…
The SARS-CoV-2 red herring
It's no longer about science.…
Visual science journalism’s DNA problem
Your left hand and right hand are mirror-images of each other. You can’t superimpose them completely even after all manner of rotations and translations. Only mirroring them works. The same thing can…
What is ONOS's (real) problem?
The Indian government set the country’s research community aflutter when it announced the launch of a long-awaited plan to improve research access without announcing many of its salient details as wel…
Solve all our problems
This is xkcd #1232. When it came out I remember it was to rebut a particular line of argument against NASA’s lunar and interplanetary missions — that the agency was spending large sums of money that w…
Keep the crap going
Have you seen the new ads for Google Gemini? In one version, just as a young employee is grabbing her fast-food lunch, she notices her snooty boss get on an elevator. So she drops her sandwich, rushe…
Correlation isn’t causation — the EVM edition
The space to disagree with the Election Commission’s position vis-à-vis the integrity of electronic voting machines without finding oneself backtracking into the Congress or the BJP camps is shrinking…
Review: ‘Vettaiyan’ (2024)
Watch it, but fast-forward through some parts. Vettaiyan steers clear of unconditionally qualifying “encounter killings” as the only way out — a line many Tamil films have been only too happy to tout…
Externalised costs and the human on the bicycle
Remember the most common question the protagonists of the eponymous British sitcom The IT Crowd asked a caller checking why a computer wasn’t working? “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” Nin…