Lessons from Orion's first test flight
The NASA Orion program managers Mark Geyer and Mike Hawes discussed the lessons they learnt from the crew capsule's first test flight in December 2014 with Space.com, which published the interview on March 29.…
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From Orwell to Kafka, Markov to Doctorow: Understanding Big Data through metaphors
On March 20, I attended a short talk by Malavika Jayaram, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, titled 'What we talk about when we talk about Big Data' at the T.A.J. Resid…
Curious Bends – macaroni scandal, bilingual brain, beef-eating Hindus and more
1. The great macaroni scandal in the world began in Kerala "'Only the upper class people of our larger cities are likely to have tasted macaroni, the popular Italian food. It is made from wh…
Tuberculosis's invisible millions - in cases and money
Tuberculosis (TB) has killed more than a billion people in the last 200 years. That’s more than any other infectious disease in that period. And, what’s worse is that, according to the World Health Or…
OA shouldn't stop at access
Joseph Esposito argues in the scholarly kitchen why it's okay for OA articles (which come with a CC-BY license) to be repackaged and then sold for a price by other merchants once they're out i…
A future for driverless cars, from a limbo between trolley problems and autopilots
By Anuj Srivas and Vasudevan Mukunth What’s the deal with everyone getting worried about artificial intelligence? It’s all the Silicon Valley elite seem willing to be apprehensive about, and Oxford…
Curious Bends – babies for sale, broken AIIMS, male gynaec and more
1. China has a growing online market for abducted babies "Girls fetch considerably less than boys, but there is still a market for them. Old social patterns have re-emerged in the market, like t…
The notion of natural quasicrystals is here to stay
In November 2008, Luca Bindi, a curator at the Universita degli Studi di Firenze, Italy, found that the alloy of aluminium and copper called khatyrkite could be a quasicrystal. Bindi couldn't be s…
The Large Hadron Collider is back online, ready to shift from the "what" of reality to "why"
The world’s single largest science experiment will restart on March 23 after a two-year break. Scientists and administrators at the European Organization for Nuclear Research – known by its French acr…
Why 'Mein Kampf' in 2016 will be more 'readable' than ever, not less
The first four fifths of this article are fascinating. It's titled "The future of Mein Kempf in a meme world". Though I've not consumed historically significant events with consisten…
NASA readies to test history's largest, most powerful booster for its new rocket
NASA's massive heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System, which will one day ferry humans to deep-space destinations and back, has become notorious for the scale of engineering backing it. In Sep…
Curious Bends - India's business-friendly budget, vanishing women farmers, a water-supply scare and more
1. For its ignorance of human capital, the 2015 Budget was a step back into the Third World "Oddly, the recent Budget of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) junks these insights and goes back…