Vasudevan Mukunth

Bragg-Snell law

For colours, dunk clay in water

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

Big Brother franchise

Streaming now: the 24/7 human centipede

You could be easily forgiven for not having watched, or even knowing about, the 2009 film The Human Centipede. If you hadn’t heard about this film earlier, its title can be a reverse-spoiler: you probably think a ‘human centipede’ is a twisted metaphor for some detestable aspect of the

blockchain

If WordPress supports NFTs, should I boycott it?

I’m a blogger, an amateur coder and an employee at a nonprofit organisation. My experience in these realms of endeavour is such that, taken together, keeping my blog online means a) using a trustworthy web host, b) using a simple as well as moderately featureful content management system, c)

Eva Hemmungs Wirtén

Marie Curie: An icon or 'in the way'?

Who would have been the most iconic woman physicist of all time if the Nobel Prizes didn’t exist? In 2017, Science published an article by Eva Hemmungs Wirtén to commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of Marie Curie. I got to it today because of this tweet: Marie Sklodowska Curie

blogging

A nominal milestone

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

Anil Menon

PTI, celebrating scientists, and class/caste

SpaceX announced a day or two ago that the crew of its upcoming Polaris Dawn mission will include a space operations engineer at the company named Anna Menon. As if on cue, PTI published a report on February 15 under the headline: “SpaceX engineer Anna Menon to be among crew

Ayushman Bharat

'Steps in the right direction' are not enough

This is a step in the right direction, and the government needs to do more. You often read articles that have this sentence, typically authored by experts who are writing about some new initiative of the Indian government. These articles are very easy to find after the government has made

Big Tech

Crypto: Climate change means new tech has less time today to prove itself

I spent this weekend reading about permissioned and permissionless blockchain systems. If you want to get in on it, I can’t recommend this post by David Rosenthal enough. Much of the complexity of executing transactions of the major extant cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin and ether, arises from the need for

cryptocurrency

The persistence of NFTs

NFTs freak me out. One of the ways in which my grandmother lost touch with her daughter – my mother – was my mother’s generation’s access to and use of computers, smartphones and the internet. And one of the ways in which my mother and father are out of touch

Department of Atomic Energy

Review of a review: 'Rocket Boys' (2022)

Tanul Thakur has reviewed a series on SonyLIV called Rocket Boys for The Wire. I haven’t watched the show and don’t plan to, for want of time as well as because, reading Thakur’s review, I think I know enough about how the series depicts the work of

English language

The new JNU VC’s statement has bad grammar. So?

I strongly disagree with some criticism that has emerged on Twitter against the new JNU vice-chancellor Santishree Pandit. The object of criticism is a statement that Pandit has apparently drafted and in which she states, broadly, what she considers to be her mandate. In response, BJP MP Varun Gandhi wrote:

gold OA

News coverage in India of open access papers

In a study published in November 2021, Teresa Schultz, of the University of Nevada, Reno, reported that gold, green and hybrid open-access (OA) modes of publishing of scientific papers were correlated with more mentions in the news. Gold OA refers to scientists publishing their paper in an OA journal, and

Bharatiya Janata Party

The BJP's fake news (fake?) meeting

Reuters published a very interesting report on February 2, entitled ‘Exclusive-In heated meeting, India seeks tougher action from U.S. tech giants on fake news’. Excerpt: Indian officials have held heated discussions with Google, Twitter and Facebook for not proactively removing what they described as fake news on their platforms,

Open Access

Are preprints reliable?

To quote from a paper published yesterday in PLOS Biology: Does the information shared in preprints typically withstand the scrutiny of peer review, or are conclusions likely to change in the version of record? We assessed preprints from bioRxiv and medRxiv that had been posted and subsequently published in a

black holes

Some facts are bigger than numbers – a story

Some facts are just boring, like 1 + 1 = 2. You already knew them before they were presented as such, and now that you do, it’s hard to know what to do with them. Some facts are clearly important, even if you don’t know how you can use them,

bad language

An Indian paper retracted for 'legal reasons'

The Editor-in-Chief has retracted this article because it was published in error before the peer review process was completed. The content of this article has been removed for legal reasons. The authors have been offered to submit a revised manuscript for further peer review. All authors agree with this retraction.

Appa Rao Podile

Why it's important to address plagiarism

Plagiarism is a tricky issue. If it’s straightforward to you, ask yourself if you’re assuming that the plagiariser (plagiarist?) is fluent in reading and writing, but especially writing, English. The answer’s probably ‘yes’. This is because for someone entering into an English-using universe for the first time,

learning outcomes

Science shouldn’t animate the need for social welfare

This is an interesting discovery: Cash payments for poor mothers increased brain function in babies, a study found, with potential implications for U.S. safety net policy. https://t.co/3rd06k0eih — NYT Science (@NYTScience) January 25, 2022 First, it’s also a bad discovery (note: there’s a difference between

Balearic Sea

Ricardo Bofill (1939-2022), architect

The Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill passed away on January 14, at the age of 82. I don’t know most of his work, which means this note of remembrance is less about Bofill the architect per se and more about Bofill the designer of the La Muralla Roja, an apartment

Ajak

What I didn't like about 'Eternals' (2021)

I rewatched Eternals today and had some time to collect some of my thoughts on it. Spoilers ahead (including one each for The Tomorrow War and Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings). 1. Too much deus ex machina – took 55 minutes minutes to find out what the Eternals

cynicism

Look away

Not something I usually blog about but boy is this funny. (At least) Star Sports has been airing an ad for an app called ‘Magicpin’ that I think helps you in some way when you shop for stuff. And this is how the ad goes: So… a fight breaks out

Jonathan Woit

Getting ahead of theory, experiment, ourselves

Science journalist Laura Spinney wrote an article in The Guardian on January 9, 2022, entitled ‘Are we witnessing the dawn of post-theory science?’. This excerpt from the article captures its points well, I thought: Or take protein structures. A protein’s function is largely determined by its structure, so if

book review

On science, religion, Brahmins and a book

I’m partway through Renny Thomas’s new book, Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment. Its description on the Routledge page reads: This book provides an in-depth ethnographic study of science and religion in the context of South Asia, giving voice to Indian scientists and shedding valuable light on

attribution

On anticipation and the history of science

In mid-2012, shortly after physicists working with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe had announced the discovery of a particle that looked a lot like the Higgs boson, there was some clamour in India over news reports not paying enough attention or homage to the work of Satyendra Nath

Bulli Bai app

The Print's ludicrous article on Niraj Bishnoi

The Print has just published a bizarre article about Niraj Bishnoi, the alleged “mastermind” (whatever that means) of the ‘Bulli Bai’ app. I know nothing about Niraj Bishnoi; the article’s problem is that it has reproduced the Delhi police’s profile of Bishnoi and indications in that profile, provided