Fanning the flames
https://twitter.com/voxdotcom/status/1146773174975156224 This is the second tweet I'm seeing phrased like this. It lacks context and is provocative, perhaps deliberately? It seems to encourage de…
A different kind of refrigerator
Say your house on the ground-floor is ankle deep in water – a common sight in most Indian cities during the monsoons. So you grab a pail and start throwing the water out in a four-step process: 1. Y…
To understand Spivak
It is quite bizarre to read Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and be able to understand anything. It is even more bizarre to agree with her views about mundane things like the news or being a little anxious…
Groundwater extinction
In a report published on June 14, 2018, NITI Aayog, a policy think-tank established by the Government of India, claimed that 21 Indian cities would run out of their supply of groundwater by 2020. The…
Assuming you speak Hindi…
I can't use the terms 'Gaganyaan' and 'Vyomanaut' or 'Gaganaut' in place of 'Indian human spaceflight mission' and 'Indian astronauts' because of the bad ta…
To be a depressed person reading about research on depression
It’s a strangely unsettling experience to read about research on an affliction that one has, to understand how scientists are obtaining insights into it using a variety of techniques that allow them t…
Can gravitational waves be waylaid by gravity?
Yesterday, I learnt the answer is 'yes'. Gravitational waves can be gravitationally lensed. It seems obvious once you think about it, but not something that strikes you (assuming you're no…
Solutions looking for problems
There’s been a glut of ‘science projects’ that seem to be divorced from their non-technical aspects even when the latter are equally, if not more, important – or maybe it is just a case of these probl…
The 'could've, should've, would've' of R&D
ISRO's Moon rover, which will move around the lunar surface come September (if all goes well), will live and and die in a span of 14 days because that's how long the lithium-ion cells it's…
Alt-M.O.M.
Posters for a new TV show called M.O.M. – The Women Behind Mission Mangal, produced by Ekta Kapoor and distributed by AltBalaji, look strange. One poster shows four women, presumably the show's pr…
Making history at the speed of light
Last week, Sophia Gad-Nasr, an astroparticle physicist and PhD student at University of California, Irvine, tweeted this question: https://twitter.com/Astropartigirl/status/1135533079852773376 To wh…
A religious environmentalism
June 5 was World Environment Day, which is presumably why an article entitled 'Hindu roots of modern 'ecology'' was doing the rounds on Twitter, despite having been published in 2016.…