Long ideas
Thus far, the composition of claims in my pieces has followed a simple pattern, even a rule: I break down a claim into a series of reasons that, when processed in serial fashion, leads up to the final…
Climate: The US needs to do more – and India needs to, too
Shortly after the IPCC published the first installment of its AR6 report, The Wire Science produced a short video explaining the report’s salient points. It swiftly met with some backlash from some sc…
Stream of nothing
I decided to go out this evening. First I went to Bookworm's new setup on Church Street. There, I started skimming the shelves from the first one on the right, moving from right to left, front to…
They're trying to build a telescope
If a telescope like the TMT and a big physics experiment like the INO are being stalled for failing to account for the interests and sensibilities of the people already living at or near their planned…
PeerJ's peer-review problem
Of all the scientific journals in the wild, there are a few I keep a closer eye on: they publish interesting results but more importantly they have been forward-thinking on matters of scientific publi…
Engels, Weinberg
Dialectics of Nature, Friedrich Engels, 1883 (ed. 1976): … an acquaintance with the historical course of evolution of human thought, with the views on the general inter-connections in the external wo…
Cooperative distrust
Is there a doctrine or manifesto of cooperative distrust? Because I think that’s what we need today, in the face of reams of government data — almost all of it, in fact — that is untrustworthy, and th…
The problem with rooting for science
The idea that trusting in science involves a lot of faith, instead of reason, is lost on most people. More often than not, as a science journalist, I encounter faith through extreme examples – such as…
Boron nitride, tougher than it looks
During World War I, a British aeronautical engineer named A.A. Griffith noticed something odd about glass. He found that the atomic bonds in glass needed 10,000 megapascals of stress to break apart –…
On tabletop accelerators
Tabletop accelerators are an exciting new field of research in which physicists use devices the size of a shoe box, or something just a bit bigger, to accelerate electrons to high energies. The ‘conve…
NCBS fracas: In defence of celebrating retractions
Continuing from here… Irrespective of Arati Ramesh's words and actions, I find every retraction worth celebrating because how hard-won retractions in general have been, in India and abroad. I don…
NCBS retraction – addenda
My take on the NCBS paper being retracted, and the polarised conversation that has erupted around the incident, is here. The following are some points I'd like to add. a. Why didn't the edito…