Breaking down CMB Bharat
A consortium of Indian scientists has submitted a proposal to the national space agency for a new space science mission called CMB Bharat. Let’s break it down. What is CMB Bharat? According to Tarun Souradeep,…
January 2019
ISRO’s amazing tender notice
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has provided more details about its Gaganyaan programme, including new stages for its GSLV Mk III launch vehicle, through – of all things – a tender notice. Such surreptitiousness…
Compare ideas with ideas
Avi Loeb in his interview to the New Yorker: We don’t have as much data as I would like. Given the data that we have, I am putting this on the table, and it bothers…
The problem with claiming “it’s aliens”
A Harvard astronomer believes that an interstellar object could possibly have originated from a civilization outside our solar system: https://t.co/qsLjVPGJy4 pic.twitter.com/x7jh3wnRDm — The New Yorker (@NewYorker) January 23, 2019 https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js I doubt the New Yorker…
Just how many reusable rocket designs is ISRO working on?
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is working on at least three different designs of reusable launch vehicles at the same time. Together with its endeavours to increase the number of objectives per mission and…
A close shave with the criticism question
Pamela Philipose, the public editor of The Wire, raised an important question towards the end of her latest column: Sudhir Angadi wants to know why The Wire is “loaded with so much of negativity”. He…
Not all retracted papers are fake news – but then, which ones are?
The authors of a 2017 paper about why fake news spreads so fast have asked for it to be retracted because they’ve discovered a flaw in their analysis. This is commendable because it signals that…
A sudden spike in meteor influx 290 Mya
About 300 million years ago, something happened. And the Moon was hit by meteorites twice to thrice as often after this period than before. The Solar System has always been a dangerous place for careless…
An Earth sciences ministry
On January 15, Harsh Vardhan, the Union science and technology minister, mulled renaming India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) as “Bharat Mata Mantralaya”. (In Hindi, the ministry is currently called the ‘Prithvi Vigyan Mantralaya’.) Vardhan…
CERN’s next collider looks a bit like China’s
The world’s largest particle physics laboratory has unveiled its design options for the Large Hadron Collider’s successor – what is expected to be a 100-km long next generation ‘supercollider’. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research…
A very big sentence
Writing on analytic philosophy is apparently very complex. One essay published on 3QD argues that it actually needs to be that way, and quotes a linguist quoting a philosopher to make its case. The quotation…
Driving down the moderated way
There’s a really yucky scene in the really yucky movie based on the half-yucky book Atlas Shrugged. A copper-mining tycoon who blew up his own mines says in a conversation with his railroad-tycoon friend, “They…