Are major science prizes a form of philanthropy?
The Association for the Advancement of AI conferred its 'Squirrel AI Award' on Cynthia Rudin, and Duke University – her employer – published a press release celebrating it. Here's one para…
Analysis
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Political merch from a newsroom
Shekhar Gupta, the editor of The Print, shared the following image on his Instagram profile a couple days ago: The post had the following note: Since we so love politics at ThePrint, we are developi…
India and the 2021 medicine Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for 2021 has been awarded to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for discovering the receptors in the human body responsible for our ability to feel heat and…
ISRO's national interest bullshit
For data and other objects, like images and videos, it places in the public domain, the Indian government attaches the GODL license – short for ‘government open data license’. The terms of this licens…
The Nobel Prize, its men and climate change
The sciences part of this year’s Nobel Prize announcements have concluded. These are the new laureates: * Physics – Syukuro Manabe 🇯🇵 🇺🇸, Klaus Hasselmann 🇩🇪 and Giorgio Parisi 🇮🇹 * Chemist…
Railroad to zealotry
"It would not be unusual for finger-stick testing to be met with skepticism," says a spokesman for Theranos. "Patents from that period explain Elizabeth’s ideas and were foundational fo…
Long ideas
Thus far, the composition of claims in my pieces has followed a simple pattern, even a rule: I break down a claim into a series of reasons that, when processed in serial fashion, leads up to the final…
Climate: The US needs to do more – and India needs to, too
Shortly after the IPCC published the first installment of its AR6 report, The Wire Science produced a short video explaining the report’s salient points. It swiftly met with some backlash from some sc…
Cooperative distrust
Is there a doctrine or manifesto of cooperative distrust? Because I think that’s what we need today, in the face of reams of government data — almost all of it, in fact — that is untrustworthy, and th…
The problem with rooting for science
The idea that trusting in science involves a lot of faith, instead of reason, is lost on most people. More often than not, as a science journalist, I encounter faith through extreme examples – such as…
NCBS fracas: In defence of celebrating retractions
Continuing from here… Irrespective of Arati Ramesh's words and actions, I find every retraction worth celebrating because how hard-won retractions in general have been, in India and abroad. I don…
Pseudoscientific materials and thermoeconomics
The Shycocan Corp. took out a full-page jacket ad in the Times of India on June 22 – the same day The Telegraph (UK) had a story about GBP 2,900 handbags by Gucci that exist only online, in some video…