Accumulation then philanthropy
Peter Woit's review of a new book about Jim Simons, the mathematician and capitalist who set up the Simons Foundation, which funds math and physics research around the world but principally in the…
To see faces where there are none
This week in "neither university press offices nor prestigious journals know what they're doing": a professor emeritus at Ohio University who claimed he had evidence of life on Mars, and…
Indian scicomm's upside-down world
Imagine a big, poisonous tree composed of all the things you need to screw up to render a field, discipline or endeavour an elite club of just one demographic group. When it comes to making it more in…
A new map of Titan
It’s been a long time since I’ve obsessed over Titan, primarily because after the Cassini mission ended, the pace of updates about Titan died down, and because other moons of the Solar System (Europa,…
The trouble with laser-cooling anions
For scientists to use lasers to cool an atom, the atom needs to have two energy states. When laser light is shined on an atom moving towards the source of light, one of its electrons absorbs a photon,…
Quitting the Thing
A year ago today, I quit the Thing. The Thing didn't quit me until three months later, and spending those months not getting back to the Thing was the most difficult thing I ever did. Earlier on…
Playing the devil's advocate on Starlink
After SpaceX began to launch its Starlink satellite constellation to facilitate global internet coverage, astronomers began complaining that the satellites are likely to interfere with stargazing sche…
The invitations
First, I was invited to speak at a science communication meeting in X in November. Next, I was invited to host an event at Y around the same date. Then I was invited to speak at Z on the same date. Si…
The cycle
Is it just me or does everyone see a self-fulfilling prophecy here? https://twitter.com/nature/status/1192129029924634625 For a long time, and assisted ably by the ‘publish or perish’ paradigm, rese…
New management at Nautilus
When an email landed in my inbox declaring that the beleaguered science communication magazine Nautilus would be "acquired by ownership group of super-fans", I thought it was going to become…
The private festival
I used to think I lived in a wonderful part of Bangalore: in Malleshwaram, and not just in Malleshwaram but in a gated apartment complex with great access to greenery and lots of eateries, safe walkin…
Disastrous hype
This is one of the worst press releases accompanying a study I've seen: The headline and the body appear to have nothing to do with the study itself, which explores the creative properties of an…