Science Quiz - July 7, 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…
Uncategorized
767 posts
Draft policy on increasing access to DBT/DST research
An Open Access Policy Committee has drafted a policy to enhance access to publicly funded research by setting up a national open access (OA) repository under the oversight of the Department of Biotech…
New Higgs results show signs of SUSY
Two years ago, physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider first announced the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle, setting the high-energy physics community atwitter. And it was only a coupl…
The federation of our digital identities
Facebook, Twitter, email, WordPress, Instagram, online banking, the list goes on... Offline, you're one person maintaining (presumably) one identity. On the web, you have many of them. All of them…
What is VLBI?
On June 25, scientists announced the discovery of a trio of supermassive black holes at the center of a galaxy 4.2 billion light years away. The find was credited to the European VLBI Network. A Space…
My camera took me for a walk last evening.
Inspecting nuclear warheads like they were passwords
Nuclear weapon inspectors have a weighty but tricky job. An inspecting state relies on them to verify if a weapon is a nuclear warhead, but the state whose weapons are being inspected doesn't want…
A gamma ray telescope at Hanle: A note
A gamma ray telescope is set to come up at Hanle, Ladakh, in 2015 and start operations in 2016. Hanle was one of the sites proposed to install a part of the Cherenkov Telescope Array, too. A survey co…
Did Facebook cheat us?
No. There were some good arguments on this topic, swinging between aesthetic rebuttals to logical deconstructions. Here are four I liked: 1. Tal Yarkoni, Director of the Psychoinformatics Lab at Uni…
Science Quiz - June 30, 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 answ…
Looking for life? Look for pollution.
Four-thousand years on Earth and we've a lot of dirt to show for it. Why would an advanced alien civilization be any different? That's the motivation that three astrophysicists from Harvard U…
Blogging at NYTimes and The Hindu
I'm going to draw some parallels here between the The New York Times and The Hindu in the context of Times's decision to shut or merge up to half of its blogs (Disclosure: I launched The Hindu…