Doubts cast on LIGO results… again
A group of Danish physicists that doubted last year whether two American experiments to detect gravitational waves had actually confused noise for signal has reared its head once more. New Scientist r…
Expertise's place
Over 1,600 scientists have signed a letter of protest addressed to the White House against its proposed definition of 'gender' that purportedly disidentifies transgender and intersex people. A…
New anomaly at the LHC
Has new ghost particle manifested at the Large Hadron Collider?, The Guardian, October 31: The prospect of such a mysterious particle has baffled physicists as much as it has excited them. At the mom…
Does the neutrino sector violate CP symmetry?
The universe is supposed to contain equal quantities of matter and antimatter. But this isn’t the case: there is way more matter than antimatter around us today. Where did all the antimatter go? Physi…
Train ride
What makes a train ride a train ride? I regularly travel between Bangalore and Chennai, using the morning Shatabdi every time. These train rides are not easy to love even the Shatabdi’s coaches have g…
Personal notes on the Vinod Dua case
Background information + The Wire's statements on the issue: 1. Panel Headed by Former SC Justice Aftab Alam to Examine Allegation Against Vinod Dua 2. The Wire’s Handling of the Sexual Harassm…
Catching up with the Kharkhanas tragedy
Can't believe I'm so late to the party. It seems that a year ago, Steven Erikson put the Kharkhanas Trilogy on hold, delaying the publication of the third book. The second book, Fall of Light,…
Climate fear
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently published a report exhorting countries committed to the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to an additional 1.5º by the end of this century.…
What the Nobel Prizes are not
The winners of this year's Nobel Prizes are being announced this week. The prizes are an opportunity to discover new areas of research, and developments there that scientists consider particularly…
Proposed solution for Riemann hypothesis?
The hot news this week from the mathematical physics world is that the noted mathematician Michael Atiyah claimed to have solved the Riemann hypothesis, one of the most difficult unsolved problems kno…
An epistocracy
The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has proposed a new textbook that will discuss the 'Indian knowledge system' via a number of pseudoscientific claims about the supposed inv…
Storm-seeker
For the last two nights, the skies of Bangalore have been opening up, as if for me. Last night, it poured rivers. The sky flashed with the kind of lightning that makes you say you’ve never seen lightn…