On September 6, 2019, two researchers from Israel uploaded a preprint to the bioRxiv preprint server entitled ‘Can scientists fill the science journalism void? Online public engagement with two science stories authored by scientists’. Two…
When you squeeze some crystals, you distort their lattice of atoms just enough to separate a pair of charged particles and that in turn gives rise to a voltage. Such materials are called piezoelectric crystals.…
SpaceX’s Starlink constellation is currently a network of 120+ satellites and which, in the next decade, will expand to 10,000+ to provide low-cost internet from space around the world. Astronomers everywhere have been pissed off…
A press-officer friend recently asked me for pointers on how he could help journalists cover the research institute he now works at better. My response follows: Avoid the traditional press release format and use something…
First As a professional science journalist, I’ve accrued a long list of ‘contacts’ in India and abroad, so whenever I discuss my career prospects with friends, I’m often told that I’m well-setup to become a…
The poster for a new biographical feature about former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa is out, featuring Kangana Ranaut: At first glance, it’s not evident that the woman in the picture is Ranaut, nor…
Peter Woit’s review of a new book about Jim Simons, the mathematician and capitalist who set up the Simons Foundation, which funds math and physics research around the world but principally in the West to…
This week in “neither university press offices nor prestigious journals know what they’re doing”: a professor emeritus at Ohio University who claimed he had evidence of life on Mars, and whose institution’s media office crafted…
Imagine a big, poisonous tree composed of all the things you need to screw up to render a field, discipline or endeavour an elite club of just one demographic group. When it comes to making…
It’s been a long time since I’ve obsessed over Titan, primarily because after the Cassini mission ended, the pace of updates about Titan died down, and because other moons of the Solar System (Europa, Io,…
For scientists to use lasers to cool an atom, the atom needs to have two energy states. When laser light is shined on an atom moving towards the source of light, one of its electrons…
A year ago today, I quit the Thing. The Thing didn’t quit me until three months later, and spending those months not getting back to the Thing was the most difficult thing I ever did.…