The journal’s part in a retraction
What explains a journal’s peer-review producing two different results on two separate occasions?
September 2023
On Agnihotri’s Covaxin film, defamation, and false bravery
Vivek Agnihotri’s next film, The Vaccine War, is set to be released on September 28. It is purportedly about the making of Covaxin, the COVID-19 vaccine made by Bharat Biotech, and claims to be based…
On India’s new ‘Vigyan Puraskar’ awards
The Government of India has replaced the 300 or so awards for scientists it used to give out until this year with the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar (RVP), a set of four awards with 56 laureates,…
The ‘Climate Overshoot’ website
Earlier this evening, as I was working on my laptop, I noticed that it was rapidly heating up, to the extent that it was burning my skin through two layers of cloth. This is a…
Hasan Minhaj’s search for the premise
When Hasan Minhaj spoke on his show about living through some dangerous experiences as a Muslim man from an Indian family growing up in the US of A, he wasn’t speaking the truth. He told…
The AI trust deficit predates AI
There are alien minds among us. Not the little green men of science fiction, but the alien minds that power the facial recognition in your smartphone, determine your creditworthiness and write poetry and computer code.…
Scientists’ conduct affects science
Nature News has published an excellent feature by Edwin Cartlidge on the “wall of scepticism” that arose in response to the latest superconductivity claim from Ranga Dias et al., purportedly in a compound called nitrogen-doped…
The UAE’s hacks for international prominence
The UAE seems to be making a sincere attempt to whitewash itself, according to a New York Times report on September 1, by hosting the COP28 climate talks. This is both unsurprising and fascinating –…
The Kapitza pendulum
Rarely does a ‘problem’ come along that makes you think more than casually about the question of mathematics’s reality, and problems in mathematical physics are full of them. I came across one such problem for…