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Will an Indian win an Ig Nobel by 2035?
The 28th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony concluded yesterday, handing out 10 prizes to 38 recipients with institutional affiliations in 26 countries. There is one recipient with an affiliation
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Board games
Every Thursday, a Bangalore-based community called ReRoll organises an evening of boardgames open to all at Lahe Lahe, a café in Indira Nagar. According to the organisers, about 40 people
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Absolute hot
There's only one absolute zero but there are multiple absolute 'hots', depending on the temperature at which various theories of physics break down. This is an
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On the banner on the ISRO homepage
The ISRO homepage has been hijacked by an almost-full-page banner soliciting readers' comments about Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Independence Day speech. A friend was understandably irked by
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Failing Sarabhai
We are convinced that if we are to play a meaningful role nationally, and in the community of nations, we must be second to none in the application of advanced
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High-temp. superconductivity, hype cycles and peer review
TL;DR – Journalists are already more accountable than the publishers of scientific journals are. If scientists find journalistic review of the scientific literature to be lacking, help them improve instead
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Ghost's Koenig editor
The new content editor in the Ghost CMS, named Koenig, is quite good, a much smoother use than WordPress's new Gutenberg. Ghost's latest iteration in v1.
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Weekend getaway
I just spent the weekend at Sunti koppa, a small village to the northwest of Mysore, in Kodagu, a.k.a. Coorg, district. I was there with my relatives – six
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Pro-preprints around the world
After I published my rebuttal to the Nature anti-preprints article, a scientist in the US wrote to me saying he was on the journal's side and that he
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Non-ergodicity and diversity
Ergodicity is the condition wherein a sample is representative of the whole vis-a-vis some statistical parameter. An ergodic system is one that visits all possible states of its existence as
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A new discrimination
An article in KurzweilAI begins, Plants could soon provide our electricity. Why would anyone take this seriously? More than excitement, this line rouses a discerning reader to suspicion. It is
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Preprints don't promote confusion – so taking them away won't fix anything
In response to my Twitter thread against Tom Sheldon's anti-preprints article in Nature, I received more responses in support of Sheldon's view than I expected. So
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A detector for electron ptychography
Anyone who writes about physics research must have a part of their headspace currently taken up by assessing a new and potentially groundbreaking claim out of the IISc: the discovery
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Redshift and eclipse
I am thoroughly dispirited. I had wanted to write today about how it is fascinating that we have validated Einstein's theory of general relativity for the first time
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Silly arguments to restrict access to preprints
Tom Sheldon, a senior press manager at the Science Media Centre (SMC), London, had an interesting proposition – at least at first – published in Nature on July 24. The journal'