Toll of Jure landslide mounts
On August 2, a landslide in Nepal's Sindhupalchowk district resulted in 33 deaths, with more than 120 missing and 400 displaced. A preliminary survey by the local District Disaster Relief Committe…
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Following up on the DBT/DST OA policy
Earlier in July, a group of people working with the Departments of Biotechnology and Science & Technology (DBT/DST) of the Government of India had drafted an open access policy covering research f…
Some research misconduct trends by the numbers
A study published in eLIFE on August 14, 2014, looked at data pertaining to some papers published between 1992 and 2012 that the Office of Research Integrity had determined contained research miscondu…
Life on Titan's world of goo
In the August 8 issue of Science, an international team of scientists has a paper that submits evidence of life in an asphalt lake in Trinidad. Despite having a low water content of 13.5%, it still po…
Life on Titan's world of goo
In the August 8 issue of Science, an international team of scientists has a paper that submits evidence of life in an asphalt lake in Trinidad. Despite having a low water content of 13.5%, it still po…
Curious Bends – Indian Luddites, an academic career, the great forgetting and more
Curious Bends is a weekly newsletter about science, tech., data and India. Akshat Rathi and I curate it. You can subscribe to it here. If have feedback, suggestions, or would just generally like to ge…
Wealth and religiosity disagree while some Hindus look the other way
My extended family's annual trip to Tirupati is coming up. Because a more indecisive bunch doth not exist, my relatives have been planning the trip for the last week. One creepy fact their discuss…
For planets, one thing leads to another
One of the biggest benefits of being a journalist is that you become aware of interesting things from various fields. As a science journalist, the ambit is narrowed but the interestingness, not at all…
Products of uranium-235 fission
When I read, it's always one thing leading to another. Someone tipped me off about a piece in Science about CTBT compliance monitoring efforts, and I ended up making this incredibly ghastly but sa…
Female parliamentarians
India: GDP (per capita, 2013 US$) v. Gross intake ratio in first grade of primary education, female (% of relevant age group) v. Women in parliament (each point corresponds to a year in 1997-2013) In…
Science Quiz - August 4, 2014
Every week, I create a science quiz for The Hindu newspaper’s In School product. It consists of 10 questions and only developments from the week preceding its day of publication (Monday). The answers…
Keeping up with the radioxenons
After the first of two nuclear weapon tests by North Korea, in 2006, a monitoring station in Yellowknife, Canada, caught a whiff of xenon-133, a radioactive isotope of xenon, in the atmosphere. It had…