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Category Archives: Scicomm
How does a fan work?
Everywhere I turn, all the talk is about the coronavirus, and it’s exhausting because I already deal with news of the coronavirus as part of my day-job. It’s impossible to catch people having conversations about anything else at all. I … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged AC motor, aerodynamics, airfoils, Bernoullis principle, brush comutator, capacitance, capacitor regulator, continuity equation, convection, DC motor, drag, electric current, Electromagnetism, electromagnets, graphite, induction motor, Lenz law, lift, Lorentz force, magnetization, split-ring commutator, steel, synchronous motor, three phase current
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On India’s path to community transmission
There’s a virus out there among many, many viruses that’s caught the world’s attention. This virus came into existence somewhere else, it doesn’t matter where, and developed a mutation at some point that allowed it to do what it needs … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Scicomm
Tagged Bernoulli distribution, binomial distribution, community transmission, coronavirus, COVID-19, demonetisation, epidemiology, healthcare expenditure, Homo sapiens, Indian Council of Medical Research, infectious diseases, local transmission, novel coronavirus, pandemic, World Health Organization
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‘Hunters’, sci-fi and pseudoscience
One of the ways in which pseudoscience is connected to authoritarian governments is through its newfound purpose and duty to supply an alternate intellectual tradition that subsumes science as well as culminates in the identitarian superiority of a race, culture … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Scicomm, Science
Tagged Adolf Hitler, Bharatiya Janata Party, civil aviation, Delhi riots, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, electricity, ethnic cleansing, Hindutva, Hunters, identity politics, John Forster, Nazism, occult, provincialism, pseudoscience, sci-fi, science fiction, technology, The Coming Race, Vril
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Dehumanising language during an outbreak
It appears the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has begun local transmission in India, i.e. infecting more people within the country instead of each new patient having recently travelled to an already affected country. The advent of local transmission is an important event … Continue reading
Posted in Op-eds, Scicomm, Science
Tagged Amit Shah, Bharatiya Janata Party, COVID-19, dehumanisation, Eman Ahmed, epidemic, Harsh Vardhan, infection, infectious diseases, local transmission, private healthcare, public healthcare system, Saifee Hospital, SARS-CoV-2, science communication, science journalism, The Guardian, Washington Post, Wuhan coronavirus
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A new beginning
When The Wire was launched on May 11, 2015, we (the editors) decided to organise the site’s content within six principal categories: politics, political economy, foreign affairs, science, culture and law. In the five years since, the Big Three categories — politics, … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm, Science
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Mad Mike: Foolish Road
On Sunday, an American thrill-seeker named Mike Hughes died after attempting to launch himself to an altitude of 5,000 feet on a homemade steam-powered rocket. A video of the accident is available because a crew of the Science Channel filmed … Continue reading
The difficulty of option ‘c’
Can any journalist become a science journalist? More specifically, can any journalist become a science journalist without understanding the methods of scientific practice and administration? This is not a trivial question because not all the methods of science can be … Continue reading
A trumpet for Ramdev
The Print published an article entitled ‘Ramdev’s Patanjali does a ‘first’, its Sanskrit paper makes it to international journal’ on February 5, 2020. Excerpt: In a first, international science journal MDPI has published a research paper in the Sanskrit language. … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged Acharya Balkrishna, Ayurveda, FMCG, FSSAI, MDPI, objectivity, peer review, pseudoscience, psoriasis, science journalism, scientific publishing, The Print, Withania somnifera
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Another controversy, another round of blaming preprints
On February 1, Anand Ranganathan, the molecular biologist more popular as a columnist for Swarajya, amplified a new preprint paper from scientists at IIT Delhi that (purportedly) claims the Wuhan coronavirus’s (2019 nCoV’s) DNA appears to contain some genes also … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Scicomm, Science
Tagged 2019 nCoV, Anand Ranganathan, bad journalism, bad science, bioRxiv, hegemony, IIT Delhi, Jonathan Pruitt, post-publication peer-review, preprint server, preprints, scientific journals, The American Naturalist, The Hindu, The Wire Science, transparency, Wuhan coronavirus
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