Something worse than a flat-Earth society
Read two interesting articles this morning: An editorial in the Indian Express about how India is the "land of the gullible", where even the "mere trappings of science suffice to tanta…
Scicomm
331 posts
The case for preprints
Daniel Mansur, the principal investigator of a lab at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina that studies how cells respond to viruses, had this to say about why preprints are useful in an intervi…
How cut-throat competition forces scientists to act against the collective
Brian Keating, an astrophysicist who led the infamous cosmic inflation announcement in 2014, thinks this is how science works: “… you put out a result, and other scientists work to test the result”. H…
Cognitive flexibility and nationalism 2.0
Remember that paper about cognitive flexibility and nationalism? The one that said people who are more nationalistic in their politics tend to have lower cognitive flexibility? I’d blogged about it he…
A peek behind the curtain of the most infamous cosmic blunder of our time
I was once stupid too, and still am in many ways. One of the instances when I was more stupid than usual was when I wrote an article about the now-infamous BICEP2 'discovery' of evidence of co…
Exploring what it means to be big
Reading a Nature report titled 'Step aside CERN: There’s a cheaper way to break open physics' (January 10, 2018) brought to mind something G. Rajasekaran, former head of the Institute of Mathe…
How science is presented and consumed on Facebook
This post is a breakdown of the Pew study titled The Science People See on Social Media, published March 21, 2018. Without further ado… or Is popularity the best way to judge if a Facebook page coun…
Jayant Narlikar's pseudo-defence of Darwin
Jayant Narlikar, the noted astrophysicist and emeritus professor at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, recently wrote an op-ed in The Hindu titled 'Science should ha…
We don't have a problem with the West, we're just obsessed with it
How much do we not know about what Indian researchers are doing simply because Western scientists haven't written to some of them?…
Dealing with plagiarism? Look at thy neighbour
Four doctors affiliated with Kathmandu University (KU) in Nepal are going to be fired because they plagiarised data in two papers. The papers were retracted last year from the Bali Medical Journal, wh…
On cancers, false balance and the judiciary
Climate change has for long been my go-to example to illustrate how absolute objectivity can sometimes be detrimental to the reliability of a news report. Stating that A said "Climate change is r…
Limitations of the Finkbeiner test
This post was republished on The Wire on January 8, 2018. The Finkbeiner test, named for science writer Ann Finkbeiner, was created to check whether a profile of a female scientist published by a mai…