Page 6 of 25
2 min read
To the moon – or the stock market?
Now this is quite upsetting. I learn from Jatan Mehta’s Moon Monday #166 that Intuitive Machines – the maker of the Odysseus spacecraft that landed on the moon on February
3 min read
Why not increase ISRO's budget?
This post is in response to a question on Reddit about why the Indian government won’t increase ISRO’s space budget. There’s a good analogy in India’s
2 min read
Poonam Pandey and peer-review
One dubious but vigorous narrative that has emerged around Poonam Pandey's "death" and subsequent return to life is that the mainstream media will publish "anything&
1 min read
Violence shuts science? Err…
Dog bites man isn't news. Man bites dog is news. I'm reminded of this adage of the news industry – and Nambi Narayanan's comment in
3 min read
Ram temple at science 'festival'
The Surya Tilak project had courted controversy in the past with Trinamool Congress's Mahua Moitra flagging it on social media in November 2021. The CSIR officials, however, defended
5 min read
An odd paper about India's gold OA fees
A paper about open-access fees in India published recently in the journal Current Science has repeatedly surfaced in my networks over some problems with it. The paper is entitled '
3 min read
What Gaganyaan tells us about chat AI, and vice versa
Talk of chat AI* is everywhere, as I'm sure you know. Everyone would like to know where these apps are headed and what their long-term effects are likely
6 min read
Cognitive ability and voting 'leave' on Brexit
In a new study published in the journal PLoS ONE on November 22, a pair of researchers from the University of Bath in the UK have reported that “higher cognitive
2 min read
India's science leadership
On October 17, the National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT) introduced a reading module for middle-school students called “Chandrayaan Utsav”. It was released by Union Education Minister Dharmendra
2 min read
Gaganyaan: The ingredient is not the recipe
For all the hoopla over indigeneity – from ISRO chairman S. Somanath exalting the vast wisdom of ancient Indians to political and ideological efforts to cast modern India as the world’
5 min read
An 'expanded' heuristic to evaluate science as a non-scientist
The Hindu publishes a column called ‘Notebook’ every Friday, in which journalists in the organisation open windows big or small into their work, providing glimpses into their process and thinking
4 min read
“Why has no Indian won a science Nobel this year?”
For all their flaws, the science Nobel Prizes – at the time they’re announced, in the first week of October every year – provide a good opportunity to learn about some
3 min read
The journal's part in a retraction
What explains a journal's peer-review producing two different results on two separate occasions?
4 min read
On India's new 'Vigyan Puraskar' awards
The Government of India has replaced the 300 or so awards for scientists it used to give out until this year with the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar (RVP), a set of
4 min read
Scientists' conduct affects science
Nature News has published an excellent feature by Edwin Cartlidge on the "wall of scepticism" that arose in response to the latest superconductivity claim from Ranga Dias et