Poonam Pandey and peer-review
One dubious but vigorous narrative that has emerged around Poonam Pandey's "death" and subsequent return to life is that the mainstream media will publish "anything". To be su…
Schrödinger's temple
On January 22, in a ceremony led by Prime Minister and now high-priest Narendra Modi, priests and officials allegedly consecrated the idol of Lord Ram at the new temple in Ayodhya, with many celebriti…
Violence shuts science? Err…
Dog bites man isn't news. Man bites dog is news. I'm reminded of this adage of the news industry – and Nambi Narayanan's comment in August 2022 – when I read reports like 'Explosion o…
Ram temple at science 'festival'
The Surya Tilak project had courted controversy in the past with Trinamool Congress's Mahua Moitra flagging it on social media in November 2021. The CSIR officials, however, defended the project a…
Using superconductors to measure electric current
Simply place two superconductors very close to each other, separated by a small gap, and you’ll have taken a big step towards an important piece of technology called a Josephson junction. When the tw…
ICC pitch-rating system is regulatory subversion
In today's edition of The Hindu, Rebecca Rose Varghese and Vignesh Radhakrishnan have a particularly noteworthy edition of their 'Data Point' column – 'noteworthy' because they'…
An odd paper about India's gold OA fees
A paper about open-access fees in India published recently in the journal Current Science has repeatedly surfaced in my networks over some problems with it. The paper is entitled 'Publications in…
What Gaganyaan tells us about chat AI, and vice versa
Talk of chat AI* is everywhere, as I'm sure you know. Everyone would like to know where these apps are headed and what their long-term effects are likely to be. But it seems that it's still to…
A survey of El Salvador's bitcoin adoption
On December 22, a group of researchers from the US had a paper published in Science in which they reported the results of a survey of 1,800 households in El Salvador over its members’ adoption, or not…
Unexpected: Magnetic regions in metal blow past speed limit
You’re familiar with magnetism, but do you know what it looks like at the smallest scale? Take a block of iron, for example. It’s ferromagnetic, which means if you place it near a permanent magnet - l…
You can do worse than watching paint dry - ask physics
I live in Chennai, a city whose multifaceted identity includes its unrelenting humidity. Its summers are seldom hotter than those in Delhi but they are more unbearable because it leaves people sweaty,…
A new path to explaining the absence of antimatter
Our universe was believed to have been created with equal quantities of matter and antimatter, only for antimatter to completely disappear over time. We know that matter and antimatter can annihilate…