Anthony Leggett Physicists observe long-expected helium superfluid phase Physicists have reported that they have finally observed helium 3 existing in a long-predicted type of superfluid, called the ß phase. This is an important discovery, if it’s borne out, for reasons that partly have to do with its isotope, helium 4. Helium 4 is a fascinating substance because
blogging Reading books, writing words It suddenly feels like a lot more people have been reading a lot more books. Or maybe they’re talking about it a lot more. I have one friend who went through more books in 2021 than there were weeks. And I’ve been quite jealous looking at her and
doubtcraft Making a good drug Priyanka Pulla has a new blog, and in her first post, she writes about her report in Mint on nitrosamine contamination in some Indian drugs and answers two follow-up questions she received from readers. One of these answers contains the following portion, describing what exactly a drug-maker needs to do
doubtcraft Railroad to zealotry “It would not be unusual for finger-stick testing to be met with skepticism,” says a spokesman for Theranos. “Patents from that period explain Elizabeth’s ideas and were foundational for the company’s current technologies.” Vanity Fair received this statement from Theranos, the company entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes founded claiming to
doubtcraft Long ideas Thus far, the composition of claims in my pieces has followed a simple pattern, even a rule: I break down a claim into a series of reasons that, when processed in serial fashion, leads up to the final thing. This has made writing pieces easy. As long as I had
doubtcraft Climate: The US needs to do more – and India needs to, too Shortly after the IPCC published the first installment of its AR6 report, The Wire Science produced a short video explaining the report’s salient points. It swiftly met with some backlash from some scientists, who were miffed that the video spoke about India reducing its carbon dioxide emissions without emphasising
Stream of nothing I decided to go out this evening. First I went to Bookworm’s new setup on Church Street. There, I started skimming the shelves from the first one on the right, moving from right to left, front to back, room by room. I picked up the first book I saw,
Astronomy They're trying to build a telescope If a telescope like the TMT and a big physics experiment like the INO are being stalled for failing to account for the interests and sensibilities of the people already living at or near their planned sites, what should scientists do when they set out to plan for the next
glamour journals PeerJ's peer-review problem Of all the scientific journals in the wild, there are a few I keep a closer eye on: they publish interesting results but more importantly they have been forward-thinking on matters of scientific publishing and they’ve also displayed a tendency to think out loud (through blog posts, say) and
Dreams of a Final Theory Engels, Weinberg Dialectics of Nature, Friedrich Engels, 1883 (ed. 1976): … an acquaintance with the historical course of evolution of human thought, with the views on the general inter-connections in the external world expressed at various times, is required by theoretical natural science for the additional reason that it furnishes a criterion of
cooperative distrust Cooperative distrust Is there a doctrine or manifesto of cooperative distrust? Because I think that’s what we need today, in the face of reams of government data — almost all of it, in fact — that is untrustworthy, and the only way it can support our democracy is if the public response to
arrow paradox The problem with rooting for science The idea that trusting in science involves a lot of faith, instead of reason, is lost on most people. More often than not, as a science journalist, I encounter faith through extreme examples – such as the Bloch sphere (used to represent the state of a qubit) or wave functions (‘mathematical
boron nitride Boron nitride, tougher than it looks During World War I, a British aeronautical engineer named A.A. Griffith noticed something odd about glass. He found that the atomic bonds in glass needed 10,000 megapascals of stress to break apart – but a macroscopic mass of glass could be broken apart by a stress of 100 megapascals.
extreme UV light On tabletop accelerators Tabletop accelerators are an exciting new field of research in which physicists use devices the size of a shoe box, or something just a bit bigger, to accelerate electrons to high energies. The ‘conventional way’ to do this has been to use machines that are as big as small buildings,
Arati Ramesh NCBS fracas: In defence of celebrating retractions Continuing from here… Irrespective of Arati Ramesh’s words and actions, I find every retraction worth celebrating because how hard-won retractions in general have been, in India and abroad. I don’t know how often papers coauthored by Indian scientists are retracted and how high or low that rate is
Arati Ramesh NCBS retraction – addenda My take on the NCBS paper being retracted, and the polarised conversation that has erupted around the incident, is here. The following are some points I’d like to add. a. Why didn’t the editorial and peer-review teams at Nature Chemical Biology catch the mistakes before the paper was
capitalism Pseudoscientific materials and thermoeconomics The Shycocan Corp. took out a full-page jacket ad in the Times of India on June 22 – the same day The Telegraph (UK) had a story about GBP 2,900 handbags by Gucci that exist only online, in some videogame. The Shycocan product’s science is questionable, at best, though
journalism Scicommers as knowledge producers Reading the latest edition of Raghavendra Gadagkar’s column in The Wire Science, ‘More Fun Than Fun’, about how scientists should become communicators and communicators should be treated as knowledge-producers, I began wondering if the knowledge produced by the latter is in fact not the same knowledge but something entirely
ferromagnets Looking for ghost particles in a frustrated world In some of the many types of objects and events involving electrons, it is helpful to think that these particles are made up of three smaller particles, called spinons, holons and orbitons. Physicists call these supposedly imaginary particles quasiparticles. By assuming that they exist, we get to simplify our calculations
biopolitics Homo medicatis With Covishield in my body, I feel like there is a capillary tube erupting from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, and its panoply of attendant bodies vis-à-vis India’s COVID-19 response, soaring across the length of India and plunging into my veins, somewhere in Bangalore. And with every
Bharat Biotech Bharat Biotech gets 1/10 for tweet If I had been Bharat Biotech’s teacher and “Where is your data?” had been an examination question, Bharat Biotech would have received 1 out of 10 marks. We are proud to #announce our 9th publication today! 12 MONTHS – 9 PUBLICATIONS. Our humble response to “Where is your #data?”… Our
engineers 'Science people' Two of the most annoying kinds of ‘science people’ I’ve come across on social media of late: * Those who perform rationalism – These people seem to know a small subset of things well and the rest on faith, and claim to know that “science can explain everything” without being able
Basecamp Hey Notes on mindful email use Recently, Basecamp released an email service, called Hey, many of whose features essentially embody a technological approach to solving one of the biggest problems with email: its users. GMail is versatile, but most people seem to use it in annoying ways (based on the email traffic in my professional inbox)
absence of evidence On the lab-leak hypothesis One problem with the debate over the novel coronavirus’s “lab leak” origin hypothesis is a problem I’m starting to see in quite a few other areas of pandemic-related analysis and discussion. It’s that no one will say why others are wrong, even as they insist others are,
causality Broken clocks during the pandemic Proponents of conspiracy theories during the pandemic, at least in India, appear to be like broken clocks: they are right by coincidence, without the right body of evidence to back their claims. Two of the most read articles published by The Wire Science in the last 15 months have been
