Trump, science denial and violence
For a few days last week, before the mail-in votes had been counted in the US, the contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump seemed set for a nail-biting finish. In this time a lot of people expresse…
How do you study a laser firing for one-quadrillionth of a second?
I'm grateful to Mukund Thattai, at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, for explaining many of the basic concepts at work in the following article. An important application of…
Vaccines for votes
A week or so ago, the Bharatiya Janata Party in Bihar released its poll manifesto, the first point on which was that should the party win, it would make a COVID-19 vaccine cleared by the ICMR availabl…
Powerful microscopy technique brings proteins into focus
Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) as a technology has become more important because the field that it revolutionised – structural biology – has become more important. The international scientific com…
A future obscured by exponential growth
A couple months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I think most of us realised how hard it is to comprehend the phenomenon of exponential growth. Mathematically, it's trivial – a geometric progression –…
The climate change of bad news
This post flows a bit like the 1987 film Full Metal Jacket. As one friend put it, “It starts somewhere and then goes in a different direction.” This year hasn’t been beset by the same old steady driz…
The passive is political
If Saruman is the stupid shit people say, I have often found Grima Wormtongue is the use of the passive voice. To the uninitiated: Wormtongue was a slimy fellow on Saruman's side in The Lord of th…
Christopher Nolan's explosion
In May, Total Film reported that the production team of Tenet, led by director Christopher Nolan, found that using a second-hand Boeing 747 was better than recreating a scene involving an exploding pl…
Thermal gun, sanitiser and volatility
Most of the shops I visit to purchase my supplies dispense an alcohol-based hand-sanitiser at the point of entry and have a person stationed there to check customers’ body temperature with a contactle…
Pandemic: A world-building exercise
First, there was light news of a vaccine against COVID-19 nearing the end of its phase 3 clinical trials with very promising results, accompanied with breezy speculations (often tied to the stock pric…
A mystery on Venus
Scientists have reported that they have found abnormal amounts of a toxic compound called phosphine in Venus's atmosphere, at 55-80 km altitude. This story is currently all over my Twitter feed be…
The ignoble president and the Nobel Prize
What is the collective noun for a group of Nobel laureates? I'm considering ballast. A ballast of Nobel laureates is appealing because these people, especially if they are all white and male, ofte…