Hey, is anybody watching Facebook?
The Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013 kicked off a flurry of social media activity that was equal parts well-meaning and counterproductive. Users on Facebook and Twitter shared reports, updates a…
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Brazuca over Jabulani for better football, say physicists
Say hello to Brazuca, the official football of the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Brazuca is a ball designed and produced by sportswear manufacturer Adidas, which also produced the Jabulani used in the 2010 Wor…
Even something will come of nothing
The Hindu June 3, 2014 "In the 3,000 years since the philosophers of ancient Greece first contemplated the mystery of creation, the emergence of something from nothing, the scientific method has…
Psych of Science: Hello World
Hello, world. :) I'm filing this post under a new category on Is Nerd called Psych of Science. A dull name but it'll do. This category will host my personal reflections on the science in the s…
Rocky exoplanets only get so big before they get gassy
By the time the NASA Kepler mission failed in 2013, it had gathered evidence that there were at least 962 exoplanets in 76 stellar systems, not to mention the final word is awaited on 2,900 more. In t…
Replication studies, ceiling effects, and the psychology of science
On May 25, I found Erika Salomon's tweet: https://twitter.com/ecsalomon/status/470599635095285760 The story started when the journal Social Psychology decided to publish successful and failed re…
All ice that falls is not an avalanche
Note: Updated with quotes from Patrick Wagnon, ICIMOD On April 18, an avalanche on Mount Everest killed 16 Nepalese guides. By the end of the month, 13 bodies had been recovered. The search for the r…
The violent history of the Chelyabinsk meteorite
The Copernican May 22, 2014 With the second largest air burst recorded in history, a meteorite exploded over the southern Ural region of Russia in February 2013 and crashed near the city of Chelyabin…
Dude, where's my comma?
(Update: Includes Gopal Gandhi's reply.) Gopalkrishna Gandhi's lead in The Hindu, 'An open letter to Narendra Modi', was a wonderful read - as if from the Keeper of the Nation's C…
Metal, flesh and monochrome
Sunday Magazine May 18, 2014 Hans Rudolf Giger, the Swiss artist who conceived of the alien xenomorph in Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), died on May 12 at the age of 84 in Zurich. Here was an artist…
'Free Indian science': Responses, rebuttals and retrenchments
In the April 3 issue of Nature, Joseph Mathai and Andrew Robinson published a Comment on the afflictions of scientific research in India - and found the interference of bureaucracy to be chief among a…
If prey can eat predators, we're ignoring evolution
The half-century old mathematics that ecologists use to understand how predator and prey populations rise and fall has received a revamp. Two scientists from Georgia Tech did this by crediting evoluti…