That the Union government and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had entered into a more intimate, but not necessarily more beneficial, relationship became evident in 2019 when then ISRO chairman K. Sivan trotted out…
2022 has been my worst on the record on several fronts. I had COVID-19 in the first month, which did a freaky number on my heart. My unexplained weight loss from 2021 continued its run…
This prompt arose in response to Stuart Ritchie’s response to a suggestion in an editorial “first published last year but currently getting some attention on Twitter” – that scientists should write their scientific papers as…
One particle in the big zoo of subatomic particles is the B meson. It has a very short lifetime once it’s created. In rare instances it decays to three lighter particles: a kaon, a lepton…
My explainer/analysis of the US nuclear fusion breakthrough was published today. Some stuff didn’t make it to the final draft for space and tone constraints; I’m publishing that below. 1. While most US government officials present…
This is welcome news: … even if it’s curious that three of the four officially stated reasons for designating this ‘dark sky reserve’ aren’t directly related to the telescopes, and that telescopes had to come…
“Science benefits all of humanity,” they say.
What does it mean to say that the speed of light is 1? We know the speed of light in the vacuum of space to be 299,792,458 m/s – or about 300,000 km/s. It’s a…
An investigation by Science has found that, today, just 3% of “PhD programs in eight disciplines at 50 top-ranked US universities” require applicants’ GRE scores, “compared with 84% four years ago”. This is good news about a test…
