science journalism

A collection of 79 posts

distribution channels

'Lots of people don't know lots of things'

You might have seen news channels on the television (if you do at all, in fact) flash a piece of information repeatedly on their screens. News presenters also tend to repeat things they’ve said 10 or 15 minutes before and on-screen visuals join in this marquee exercise. I remember

fluviodeltaic morphodynamics

Ruins of the Sutlej avulsion paper's coverage

Reporting on the new Indus civilisation study out of IIT-K and Imperial College London was an interesting experience because it afforded an opportunity to discover how the technical fields of sedimentology and hydrodynamics can help understand the different ways in which a civilisation can grow. And also how “fluviodeltaic morphodynamics”

mainstream media

Some empathy for Treebeard's privilege

There’s a line from The Two Towers (2002) that’s really stayed with me: I’m on nobody’s side because nobody is on my side. It’s spoken by Treebeard, the Ent, to one of Meriadoc/Peregrin when asked whose side he was on: Saruman’s or the

Cassandra Willyard

Taking the ringdown route to understanding the humans of science

What follows is an attempt to process and understand Cassandra Willyard’s post on Last Word on Nothing, about her preferring the humanised stories of science over the stories of the science itself (“Physics writers, this is how you nab the physics haters — human emotion”; my previous post on this

Cassandra Willyard

On that 'Last Word on Nothing' post

A post published on the Last Word On Nothing blog yesterday has been creating quite the stir on Twitter. Excerpt: While I can appreciate that this is an important scientific discovery, I still have a hard time mustering excitement over gravitational waves. I would not have read these articles had

embargoes

Confused thoughts on embargoes

Seventy! That’s how many observatories around the world turned their antennae to study the neutron-star collision that LIGO first detected. So I don’t know why the LIGO Collaboration, and Nature, bothered to embargo the announcement and, more importantly, the scientific papers of the LIGO-Virgo collaboration as well as

Abel Prize

Why do we cover the Nobel Prize announcements?

The Nobel Prizes are too big to fail. Even if they’ve become beset by a host of problems, such as: 1. Long gap between invention/discovery and recognition, 2. A large cash component given to old scientists, 3. Limiting number of awardees to three, 4. Not awarding prizes posthumously,

conflict of interest

Talking scicomm at NCBS – II

I was invited to speak to the students of the annual science writing workshop conducted at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, for the second year (first year talk’s notes here). Some interesting things we discussed: 1. Business of journalism: There were more questions from this year’s

Eric Hobsbawm

Communication, journalism and bullshit

A week or two ago, a scientist impressed with The Wire‘s coverage of science recommended that I stick to covering the good stuff (my syntax) and keep away from highlighting pseudoscience and other happenings of questionable footing. Then, a few days ago, a science writer expressed an adjacent set

Arwen Cross

Overview of science journalism in India, for WiD

Wissenschaft im Dialog is hosting “a special series about the role of science communication and science journalism in various countries”. At their request, and thrilled for the opportunity, I wrote the India edition, available to read here. The initial limit was 1,000 words but the version that got published

20th century

The raison d'être of a science journalist, courtesy Hobsbawm

For someone who reads very slowly (a 300-page book usually takes a week), Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes offered an astonishingly enjoyable experience*. A week after I picked it up at a secondhand books store, I’m 534 pages in and keep going back to it. While Hobsbawm’s

Fountain Ink

Do your bit, broaden your science menu

If you think a story was not covered by the media, it’s quite likely that that story didn’t feature in your limited news menu, and that it was actually covered by an outlet you haven’t discovered yet. In the same vein, saying the entirety of India’s

Breakthrough Listen

Auditing science stories: Two examples from the bottom rungs

There are different kinds of science stories. I don’t just mean the usual long-form, short-form stuff. I mean there are qualitatively different kinds of stories. They inhabit a hierarchy, and right at the bottom is getting something wrong. Like the way Livemint did on April 20, 2017, reporting that

Ed Yong

The worst poem ever

How does feel to write a story and then, just like that, have everyone read it as well as be interested in reading it? How would it feel to not have to hope quasi-desperately that a story does well after having spent hours – if not days – on it? How would

alarmist

Establishing trust across the aisle on issues of climate change

Featured image: An image from a shipborne NASA investigation to study how changing conditions in the Arctic affect the ocean’s chemistry and ecosystems. Credit: gsfc/Flickr, CC BY 2.0. I met someone over the weekend who wasn’t sure: 1. That there is scientific consensus on the magnitude

2016

The metaphorical transparency of responsible media

Featured image credit: dryfish/Flickr, CC BY 2.0. I’d written a two-part essay (although they were both quite short; reproduced in full below) on The Wire about what science was like in 2016 and what we can look forward to in 2017. The first part was about how

blackholes

The nomenclature of uncertainty

The headline of a Nature article published on December 9 reads ‘LIGO black hole echoes hint at general relativity breakdown’. The article is about the prediction of three scientists that, should LIGO find ‘echoes’ of gravitational waves coming from blackhole-mergers, then it could be a sign of quantum-gravity forces at

bismuth

TIFR's superconductor discovery: Where are the reports?

Featured image: The Meissner effect: a magnet levitating above a superconductor. Credit: Mai-Linh Doan/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. On December 2, physicists from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) announced an exciting discovery: that the metal bismuth becomes a superconductor at a higher temperature than predicted by

Atomki

UCal Irvine’s ‘fifth force’ farce

Michael Moyer just concluded a rant on Twitter (at the time of writing this) about how a press release on a recent theoretical physics result developed at the University of California, Irvine, had muddled up coverage on an important experimental particle physics result. I was going to write about this

blogging

'Infinite in All Directions', a science newsletter

At 10 am (IST) every Monday, I will be sending out a list of links to science stories from around the web, curated by significance and accompanied by a useful blurb, as a newsletter. If you’re interested, please sign up here. If you’d like to know more before

anti-depressants

Curious Bends – outraged warriors, bizarre obsessions, dubious drugs and more

It’s been one year since we launched Curious Bends – a newsletter where we bring you science, technology, data and India stories from around the web, once a week (subscribe). We’ve enjoyed serving you important and interesting stories. Thank you for being loyal subscribers! Anniversaries are a good time

bargaining power

Science journalism as an institutional undertaking

“The paper has been through many financial crises and Science Times has not been affected.” These were the words of David Corcoran, Editor, NYT Science Times, who’d dropped by my NYU SHERP class today for a short presentation and some Q&A. David said that in response to

Dan Fagin

NYUlab: Beat-sculpting, money-making and science journalism

(This blog post belongs to a series, presumptuously titled NYUlab, about interesting thoughts and experiences I have as I pursue an MA in science, health and environmental reporting at New York University.) Today, my class had two guests. Malcolm Ritter, whose Twitter profile reads “Associated Press science reporter”, is not

Dan Fagin

Beat-sculpting, money-making and science journalism

Today, my class had two guests. Malcolm Ritter, whose Twitter profile reads “Associated Press science reporter”, is not just any science reporter. He’s been covering science for AP for over 30 years now. While Dan Fagin said Ritter’s journey through journalism might not be relevant to our class

Current Science

A case of Kuhn, quasicrystals & communication – Part IV

Dan Shechtman won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2011. This led to an explosion of interest on the subject of QCs and Shechtman’s travails in getting the theory validated. Numerous publications, from Reuters to The Hindu, published articles and reports. In fact, The Guardian ran an online article