The Week magazine distinguished itself last year by picking Indian Council of Medical Research chief Balram Bhargava as its ‘person of the year’ for 2021. And now, ahead of National Science Day tomorrow, The Week has conducted an “exclusive” interview with science minister Jitendra Singh. Long Small story short, it’s rubbish. I discovered the term ‘Gish gallop’ in … Read more
That the Modi government has been able to coopt National Science Day as well as it has speaks only to the occasion’s moral vacuity. India’s National Science Day is the day on which physicist C.V. Raman discovered the optical effect named for him, and the government zeroed in on this discovery, over numerous others, because … Read more
Cryptocurrencies have emerged as a way to fund art, and therefore supposedly support artists, using the Trojan horse of NFTs.
It’s not exactly that simple, but it’s still a relatively simple way to produce a lovely palette of colours. Researchers from Norway and Germany have reported that when a synthetic clay called Na-fluorohectorite is suspended in water, the material separates out in thin nanosheets – i.e. nanometre-thick layers of Na-fluorohectorite separated by water. And these … Read more
“I make use of the tools available to me. That doesn’t mean I have to applaud every advance in the field.”
Who would have been the most iconic woman physicist of all time if the Nobel Prizes didn’t exist?
In 2018, I discovered that my blog posts since mid-2014 had taken on a somewhat different character than those before, becoming more critical and paralleling my increasing, and increasingly nagging, questions about what it means to be a journalist – particularly a science journalist – in India at this time. So I reorganised my blog … Read more
PTI’s decision to stick Anna Menon’s name in a headline about the new SpaceX crew makes no sense.
To laud “steps in the right direction” is to flout an intentional ignorance of the government’s track record.