PSA about Business Today
If you get your space news from the website businesstoday.in, this post is for you. Business Today has published several articles over the last few weeks about the Starliner saga with misleading headl…
Scicomm
331 posts
A spaceflight narrative unstuck
"First, a clarification: Unlike in Gravity, the 2013 film about two astronauts left adrift after space debris damages their shuttle, Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore are not stuck in space."…
Did we see the conspiracies coming?
Tweets like this seem on point… … but I’ve started to wonder if we’re missing something in the course of expressing opinions about what we thought climate deniers would say and what they’re actuall…
Agalloch
Agalloch is a synonym of agarwood. In parallel, Aquilaria agallocha and Agalochum malaccense are synonyms of Aquilaria malaccensis, the accepted scientific name of a tree that produces much of the wor…
‘Animals use physics’
What came first: physics or the world? It’s obviously the world, whereas physics (as a branch of science) offered ways to acquire information about the world and organise it. To not understand somethi…
Clocks on the cusp of a nuclear age
You need three things to build a clock: an energy source, a resonator, and a counter. In an analog wrist watch, for example, a small battery is the energy source that sends a small electric signal to…
Buildings affect winds
A 2022 trip to Dubai made me wonder how much research there was on the effects cities, especially those that are rapidly urbanising as well as are building taller, wider structures more closely packed…
You're allowed to be interested in particle physics
This page appeared in The Hindu’s e-paper today. I wrote the lead article, about why scientists are so interested in an elementary particle called the top quark. Long story short: the top quark is th…
A new source of cosmic rays?
The International Space Station carries a suite of instruments conducting scientific experiments and measurements in low-Earth orbit. One of them is the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), which studie…
Suni Williams and Barry Wilmore are not in danger
NASA said earlier this week it will postpone the return of Boeing’s crew capsule Starliner back to ground from the International Space Station (ISS), thus leaving astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita W…
The universe’s shape and its oldest light
The 3-torus is a strange and wonderful shape. We can’t readily visualise it because it has a complicated structure, but there’s a way. Imagine you’re standing inside a cube in which light is moving fr…
The pitfalls of Somanath calling Aditya L1 a "protector"
In a WhatsApp group of which I'm a part, there's a heated discussion going on around an article published by NDTV on June 10, entitled 'Sun's Fury May Fry Satellites, But India Has A W…