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5 min read
Does science have trouble seeing governments?
From ‘Energy megaproject in Chile threatens the world’s largest telescopes’, Science, January 10, 2025: The AES project would occupy several sites totaling 3000 hectares, and the plants making hydrogen
11 min read
The fever dream of 'technological sovereignty'
I recently came across an initiative called “Industrial47”. Someone had shared a link to it on a group I’m part of, and when its card loaded, the image was
11 min read
The fever dream of 'technological sovereignty'
I recently came across an initiative called “Industrial47”. Someone had shared a link to it on a group I’m part of, and when its card loaded, the image was
5 min read
A tale of two awardees
In many respects Krishna Ella and Elon Musk are poles apart but on some they share a few similarities. Both of them have played along with nationalist elements in their
5 min read
A tale of two awardees
In many respects Krishna Ella and Elon Musk are poles apart but on some they share a few similarities. Both of them have played along with nationalist elements in their
4 min read
Rescuing superconductivity
From a paper in Nature Reviews Physics, December 19, 2024: One of the forefront fields of modern superconductivity research is that on hydrides at high pressures. Over the past few
2 min read
The SARS-CoV-2 red herring
It's no longer about science.
4 min read
What is ONOS's (real) problem?
The Indian government set the country’s research community aflutter when it announced the launch of a long-awaited plan to improve research access without announcing many of its salient details
3 min read
Solve all our problems
This is xkcd #1232. When it came out I remember it was to rebut a particular line of argument against NASA’s lunar and interplanetary missions — that the agency was
4 min read
Externalised costs and the human on the bicycle
Remember the most common question the protagonists of the eponymous British sitcom The IT Crowd asked a caller checking why a computer wasn’t working? “Have you tried turning it
1 min read
Tamil Nadu's lukewarm heatwave policy
From 'Tamil Nadu heatwave policy is only a start', The Hindu, November 21, 2024: Estimates of a heatwave’s deadliness are typically based on the extent to which
2 min read
The farm fires paradox
From The Times of India on November 18, 2024: A curious claim by all means. The scientist, a Hiren Jethva at NASA Goddard, compared data from the Aqua, Suomi-NPP, and
3 min read
An infuriating editorial in Science
I’m not just disappointed with an editorial published by the journal Science on November 14, I’m angry. Irrespective of whether the Republican Party in the US has shifted
6 min read
On the 2024 Nobel Prizes and the Rosalind Lee issue
The Nobel Prizes are a deeply flawed institution both out of touch with science as it is done today and with an outsized influence on scientific practice at the most
2 min read
Numbed by numbers
Couple things in my news feed this morning that really woke me up — one a startling statistic and the other a reminder of what statistics miss. The first from Nature,