A problem worth its weight in salt
Pictures of Jupiter's moon Europa taken by the Galileo space probe between 1995 and 2003 support the possibility that Europa's surface has plate tectonics. In fact, scientists think it could b…
Ruins of the Sutlej avulsion paper's coverage
Reporting on the new Indus civilisation study out of IIT-K and Imperial College London was an interesting experience because it afforded an opportunity to discover how the technical fields of sediment…
Similar DNA
From an article in Times Now News: Comparing Prime Minister Narendra Modi with former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Union Science and Technology Minister Harsh Vardhan on Wednesday said both h…
English as the currency of science's practice
K. VijayRaghavan, the secretary of India's Department of Biotechnology, has written a good piece in Hindustan Times about how India must shed its "intellectual colonialism" to excel at s…
Why Titan is awesome #10
Titaaaaan! How much I've missed writing these posts since Cassini passed away. Unsurprisingly, it's after the probe's demise that we've really begun to realise how much of Cassini'…
What it takes to wash a strainer: soap, water and some wave optics
When I stay over at a friend's place whenever I come to Delhi, I try to help around the house. But more often than not, I just do the dishes – often a lot of dishes. One item I've always had t…
Onto drafting the gravitational history of the universe
It's finally happening. As the world turns, as our little lives wear on, gravitational wave detectors quietly eavesdrop on secrets whispered by colliding blackholes and neutron stars in distant re…
The language and bullshitness of 'a nearly unreadable paper'
Earlier today, the Retraction Watch mailing list highlighted a strange paper written by a V.M. Das disputing the widely accepted fact that our body clocks are regulated by the gene-level circadian rhy…
The language and bullshitness of 'a nearly unreadable paper'
Earlier today, the Retraction Watch mailing list highlighted a strange paper written by a V.M. Das disputing the widely accepted fact that our body clocks are regulated by the gene-level circadian rhy…
The blog and the social media
Because The Wire had signed up to be some kind of A-listed publisher with Facebook, The Wire's staff was required to create Facebook Pages under each writer/editor's name. So I created the …
Awk CZTI result from Crab pulsar
An instrument onboard the ISRO Astrosat space-telescope has studied how X-rays being emitted by the Crab pulsar are being polarised, and how such polarisation varies from one pulse to the next. This i…
That astrology workshop at the IISc
Couple caveats: 1. I wrote this post on the night of October 28, before the workshop was cancelled on the morning of October 29. I haven't bothered to change the tense because issuing this cavea…