Krishna Ella
In many respects Krishna Ella and Elon Musk are poles apart but on some they share a few similarities. Both of them have played along with nationalist elements in their respective national governments in order to further their agendas, if not profits. Both men are also at the helm of
human metapneumovirus
I sense the public panic over the HMPV outbreak in China is finally dying down. I don’t know which TV news channel picked up on it first and blew it out of proportion but it created the sort of time in which basic public health literacy would have made
Nature Reviews Physics
From a paper in Nature Reviews Physics, December 19, 2024: One of the forefront fields of modern superconductivity research is that on hydrides at high pressures. Over the past few years, this research has attracted considerable publicity, of which a substantial fraction has been negative. Scientific fraud has been committed
COVID-19 origins
It's no longer about science
chiral molecules
Your left hand and right hand are mirror-images of each other. You can’t superimpose them completely even after all manner of rotations and translations. Only mirroring them works. The same thing can happen to some molecules. When two molecules are identical in every way except their geometric structure in
Department of Science and Technology
The Indian government set the country’s research community aflutter when it announced the launch of a long-awaited plan to improve research access without announcing many of its salient details as well. On November 25, the Ministry of Education published a press release saying the Union Cabinet had approved the
Elon Musk
This is xkcd #1232. When it came out I remember it was to rebut a particular line of argument against NASA’s lunar and interplanetary missions — that the agency was spending large sums of money that would be better spent on “solving problems on Earth”. Considering Earth would always have
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Have you seen the new ads for Google Gemini? In one version, just as a young employee is grabbing her fast-food lunch, she notices her snooty boss get on an elevator. So she drops her sandwich, rushes to meet her just as the doors are about to close, and submits
Bharatiya Janata Party
The space to disagree with the Election Commission’s position vis-à-vis the integrity of electronic voting machines without finding oneself backtracking into the Congress or the BJP camps is shrinking, and both national parties as well as the Supreme Court have been wilfully engendering this state of affairs at the
Watch it, but fast-forward through some parts. Vettaiyan steers clear of unconditionally qualifying “encounter killings” as the only way out — a line many Tamil films have been only too happy to tout of late. There’s in fact an instructive passage at the film’s start that’s probably deliberate.
Remember the most common question the protagonists of the eponymous British sitcom The IT Crowd asked a caller checking why a computer wasn’t working? “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” Nine times out of 10, this fixed the problem, whatever it was, and the IT team
Though I’ve been interested of late with the idea of random walks, I was introduced to the concept when, more than two decades ago, I stumbled across Conway’s Game of Life, the cellular automaton built by John Conway in 1970. A cellular automaton is a grid of cells
This city is essentially uninhabitable from November to January inclusive and barely liveable the rest of the year. Should it even remain the nation’s capital? I realise Shashi Tharoor is frustrated here — revealing the increasingly evident gap between what the Delhi and the Indian governments can do about air
From 'Tamil Nadu heatwave policy is only a start', The Hindu, November 21, 2024: Estimates of a heatwave’s deadliness are typically based on the extent to which the ambient temperature deviates from the historical average at a specific location and the number of lives lost during and
Make sure you've read part I and part II. The project of demolishing the building opposite my house has taken a new turn. As part of the deal between me and my neighbours and the contractor, Monday, November 18, was his deadline to finish the part of the
From The Times of India on November 18, 2024: A curious claim by all means. The scientist, a Hiren Jethva at NASA Goddard, compared data from the Aqua, Suomi-NPP, and GEO-KOMPSAT 2A satellites and reported that the number of farm fires over North India and Pakistan had dropped whereas the
I’m not just disappointed with an editorial published by the journal Science on November 14, I’m angry. Irrespective of whether the Republican Party in the US has shifted more or less rightward on specific issues, it has certainly shifted towards falsehoods on many of them. Party leaders, including
Make sure you've read part I. On November 15, I lodged a complaint of excessive noise with the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board (TNPCB), whereupon I received an update saying the complaint was pending with the district environment engineer. Later the same evening, someone from the TNPCB called
This building right opposite my apartment was locked in a legal dispute for years. That must have ended a month ago (in October) because since then a bunch of workers have been toiling nine hours a day, six days a week to take it apart piece by piece. The contractor
In various settings, including chemical reactions in the lab, inside nuclear reactors, and in outer space, scientists have found C2– anions living for as long as three milliseconds before decaying to a more stable state — and they haven’t been able to explain why. Normally particles, atoms, and molecules make
Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) is a phenomenon in which one molecule transfers electronic energy to another molecule located some distance away. The transfer happens via the small electric field associated with the first molecule interacting with the field of the second. FRET microscopy takes advantage of this phenomenon to
