A trumpet for Ramdev
The Print published an article entitled 'Ramdev’s Patanjali does a ‘first’, its Sanskrit paper makes it to international journal' on February 5, 2020. Excerpt: In a first, international scien…
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Another controversy, another round of blaming preprints
On February 1, Anand Ranganathan, the molecular biologist more popular as a columnist for Swarajya, amplified a new preprint paper from scientists at IIT Delhi that (purportedly) claims the Wuhan coro…
The not-so-obvious obvious
If your job requires you to pore through a dozen or two scientific papers every month – as mine does – you'll start to notice a few every now and then couching a somewhat well-known fact in study-…
A meeting with the PSA's office
The Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) organised a meeting with science communicators from around India on January 27, in New Delhi. Some of my notes from the meeting are displayed below…
Atoms within atoms
It's a matter of some irony that forces that act across larger distances also give rise to lots of empty space – although the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. The force of gravity…
Being on the NSI podcast
Narayan Prasad, the CEO of SatSearch, hosts a popular podcast called NewSpace India. Every episode, he hosts one person and they talk about something related to the Indian and international space prog…
Free speech at the outer limits
On January 12, Peter W. Wood, president of an American organisation called the National Association of Scholars (NAS), wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal against attempts by one individual to p…
The pocket-sized accelerator
The world's largest machine is called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It's in the shape of a ring with a circumference of 26 km, and cost $3.4 billion (Rs 24,262 crore) and 12 years to build.…
Social media and science communication
The following article was originally intended for an Indian publication but I withdrew from the commission because I couldn’t rework the piece according to changes they required, mostly for lack of fo…
Retrospective: The Wire Science in 2019
At the start of 2019, The Wire Science decided to focus more on issues of science and society, and this is reflected in the year-end list of our best stories (in terms of traffic and engagement; liste…
My country is burning. Why should I work?
A few days ago, I found asking myself the following question: My country is burning, why should I work? I ended up with some (admittedly inchoate) thoughts, delineated below. I’m trying to fight off…
Poor Sanskrit
'BJP MP Says Speaking Sanskrit Beats Diabetes, Boosts Nervous System', The Wire, December 13, 2019: In a debate in the Lok Sabha on December 12 about the Sanskrit University Bill, Ganesh Sing…