Rethinking cryptocurrency
I'm still unsure about bitcoins' uncertain future as far as mainstream adoption is concerned, but such issues have been hogging media limelight so much so that people are missing out on why bi…
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Predatory publishing, vulnerable prey
On December 29, the International Conference on Recent Innovations in Engineering, Science and Technology (ICRIEST) is kicked off in Pune. It’s not a very well-known conference, but might as well have…
Solving mysteries, by William & Adso
The following is an excerpt from The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco's debut novel from 1980. The story is set in an Italian monastery in 1327, and is an intellectually heady murder mystery doused i…
CNR Rao, a faceted gem
Inquisitions are sure to follow if you've won India's highest civilian honor on the back of a little-known career. At the same time, if that career's been forged on scientific research, th…
'No string theorists in non-elite institutions'
Shiraz Naval Minwalla, a professor of theoretical physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, won the New Horizons in Physics Prize for 2013 on November 5. The prize – which…
Why do we need dark matter?
The first thing that goes wrong whenever a new discovery is reported, an old one is invalidated, or some vaguely important scientific result is announced has often to do with misrepresentation in the…
V for vendetta
The Hindu published an article on October 28, 2013, titled "He has arrears in engineering, PhD in physics". The article spoke of a 19-something year old Rohit Gunturi, a final year student o…
The literature of metaphysics (or, 'Losing your marbles' )
For a while now, I’ve been intent on explaining stuff from particle physics. A lot of it is intuitive if you go beyond the mathematics and are ready to look at packets of energy as extremely small ma…
A bounteous final frontier?
On January 22, 2013, an American company named Deep Space Industries (DSi) announced plans to launch two spacecrafts, in 2015 as a piggybacking payload named FireFly to prospect for near-Earth asteroi…
'No need to defend me.'
https://twitter.com/BoraZ/status/390614469933813760 While studying at the Asian College of Journalism, I and some 11 other students were told about the awesome man named Bora Zivkovic and his work as…
In the Valley of Drums...
For lack of a more sensational beginning: Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen fantasy fiction series is the best piece of writing I have ever encountered. Erikson's experience as a arc…
The non-Nobel for Satyen Bose
Last week, as the Nobel Prizes were announced and Peter Higgs and Francois Englert won the highly coveted physics prize, dust was kicked up in India - just as it was in July and then in September 2012…