Anti-softening science for the state
The group of ministers (GoM) report on "government communication" has recommended that the government promote “soft topics” in the media like “yoga” and “tigers”. We can only speculate what…
Scicomm
331 posts
The commentariot
The following post is an orange flag – a quieter alarm raised in anticipation of something worse that hasn't transpired yet but is likely in the offing. Earlier today, at the end of a call with a…
The clocks that used atoms and black holes to stay in sync
You're familiar with clocks. There's probably one if you look up just a little, at the upper corner of your laptop or smartphone screen, showing you what time of day it is, allowing you to qui…
Reading fog data from INSAT 3DR
At 7.57 am today, the India Meteorological Department's Twitter handle posted this lovely image of fog over North India on January 21, as captured by the INSAT 3DR satellite. However, it didn'…
The Wire Science is hiring
Location: Bengaluru or New Delhi The Wire Science is looking for a sub-editor to conceptualise, edit and produce high-quality news articles and features in a digital newsroom. Requirements * Good…
A Q&A about my job and science journalism
A couple weeks ago, some students from a university in South India got in touch to ask a few questions about my job and about science communication. The correspondence was entirely over email, and I&#…
How do you study a laser firing for one-quadrillionth of a second?
I'm grateful to Mukund Thattai, at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, for explaining many of the basic concepts at work in the following article. An important application of…
Powerful microscopy technique brings proteins into focus
Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) as a technology has become more important because the field that it revolutionised – structural biology – has become more important. The international scientific com…
Christopher Nolan's explosion
In May, Total Film reported that the production team of Tenet, led by director Christopher Nolan, found that using a second-hand Boeing 747 was better than recreating a scene involving an exploding pl…
A mystery on Venus
Scientists have reported that they have found abnormal amounts of a toxic compound called phosphine in Venus's atmosphere, at 55-80 km altitude. This story is currently all over my Twitter feed be…
Why scientists should read more
The amount of communicative effort to describe the fact of a ball being thrown is vanishingly low. It's as simple as saying, "X threw the ball." It takes a bit more effort to describe ho…
Super-spreads exist, but do super-spreaders?
What does the term ‘super-spreader’ mean? According to an article in the MIT Tech Review on June 15, “The word is a generic term for an unusually contagious individual who’s been infected with disease…