1. Standing up for the truth about homeopathy and Nazi medicine “Few people would doubt the Nazi atrocities constituted the worst violations of ethics in the history of medicine. They were possible because doctors had disregarded the most elementary rules of medical ethics. Using unproven, disproven or unsafe treatments on misinformed patients, as in alternative … Read more
The NASA Orion program managers Mark Geyer and Mike Hawes discussed the lessons they learnt from the crew capsule’s first test flight in December 2014 with Space.com, which published the interview on March 29.
On March 20, I attended a short talk by Malavika Jayaram, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, titled ‘What we talk about when we talk about Big Data’ at the T.A.J. Residency in Bengaluru. It was something of an initiation into the social and political contexts of Big Data and its usage, and … Read more
1. The great macaroni scandal in the world began in Kerala “‘Only the upper class people of our larger cities are likely to have tasted macaroni, the popular Italian food. It is made from wheat flour and looks like bits of onion leaves, reedy, hollow, but white in colour.’ This paragraph appears in a piece titled: “Ta-Pi-O-Ca … Read more
Tuberculosis (TB) has killed more than a billion people in the last 200 years. That’s more than any other infectious disease in that period. And, what’s worse is that, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), less than half the cases worldwide are ever diagnosed. India suffers the most. It has the highest burden of TB in the … Read more
Joseph Esposito argues in the scholarly kitchen why it’s okay for OA articles (which come with a CC-BY license) to be repackaged and then sold for a price by other merchants once they’re out in a paper. The economic incentive to reach new audiences could make that otherwise OA article into something that gets brought to … Read more
By Anuj Srivas and Vasudevan Mukunth What’s the deal with everyone getting worried about artificial intelligence? It’s all the Silicon Valley elite seem willing to be apprehensive about, and Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom seems to be the patron saint along with his book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014). Even if Big Data seems like it could … Read more
1. China has a growing online market for abducted babies “Girls fetch considerably less than boys, but there is still a market for them. Old social patterns have re-emerged in the market, like the sale of girls into a household where they will be servants until they and the son of the house are of … Read more
In November 2008, Luca Bindi, a curator at the Universita degli Studi di Firenze, Italy, found that the alloy of aluminium and copper called khatyrkite could be a quasicrystal. Bindi couldn’t be sure because he didn’t have the transmission electron microscope necessary to verify his find, so he couriered two grains of it to a lab in Princeton University. There, … Read more
The world’s single largest science experiment will restart on March 23 after a two-year break. Scientists and administrators at the European Organization for Nuclear Research – known by its French acronym CERN – have announced the status of the agency’s upgrades on its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its readiness for a new phase of experiments running from now until 2018. … Read more