A new source of cosmic rays?
The International Space Station carries a suite of instruments conducting scientific experiments and measurements in low-Earth orbit. One of them is the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), which studie…
Suni Williams and Barry Wilmore are not in danger
NASA said earlier this week it will postpone the return of Boeing’s crew capsule Starliner back to ground from the International Space Station (ISS), thus leaving astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita W…
A gentle push over the cliff
From ‘Rotavirus vaccine: tortured data analyses raise false safety alarm’, The Hindu, June 22, 2024: Slamming the recently published paper by Dr. Jacob Puliyel from the International Institute of Hea…
The universe’s shape and its oldest light
The 3-torus is a strange and wonderful shape. We can’t readily visualise it because it has a complicated structure, but there’s a way. Imagine you’re standing inside a cube in which light is moving fr…
An Ig Nobel Prize for North and South Korea?
In 2020, India and Pakistan shared the Ig Nobel Prize for peace “for having their diplomats surreptitiously ring each other’s doorbells in the middle of the night, and then run away before anyone had…
On the Nature feature about the Sarafs, a rare disease, and time
Heidi Ledford has a tragic and powerful story published yesterday in Nature, about a team of scientists at the CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology racing to develop a CRISPR treatment f…
The pitfalls of Somanath calling Aditya L1 a "protector"
In a WhatsApp group of which I'm a part, there's a heated discussion going on around an article published by NDTV on June 10, entitled 'Sun's Fury May Fry Satellites, But India Has A W…
A nationalism of Sunita Williams
The headlines in Indian mainstream media over the course of June 6, after Boeing (finally) launched its Starliner capsule on its first crewed test flight betray a persistent inability to let go of the…
The meaning of 294-227
As of 4.25 pm on June 4, the NDA alliance stood to win 294 seats in the Lok Sabha while the INDIA bloc was set for 225 seats. This is more than a pleasant surprise. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) c…
The cost of forgetting Ballia
Actively papering over the effects of extreme weather has to be the most self-destructive thing we’re capable of in the climate change era.…
12 years and counting
I’ve been a journalist for 12 years. For the first few years these anniversaries helped to remember that I was able to survive in the industry but now, after 12, I’m well and truly part of the industr…
The BHU Covaxin study and ICMR bait
Earlier this month, a study by a team at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in Varanasi concluded that fully 1% of Covaxin recipients may suffer severe adverse events. One percent is a large number becaus…