Monthly Archives: February 2015
A submarine on Titan in 2040
Nothing bespeaks humankind’s potential more than the following statement: Around 2040, NASA plans to splash down a submarine to explore a liquid hydrocarbon lake on Titan. Fore more than a decade now, Titan has captivated astronomers not simply by being Saturn’s largest moon by … Continue reading
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Tagged Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, ethane, hydrocarbons, Kraken Mare, methane, Saturnian system, Titan Mare Explorer, Titan Submarine, USAF DARPA X-37
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A book on the Otherside
I walked into the bookshop. The first row of books had a label on it saying ‘Recommended’. I never touched those books. They were always too mainstream, and populism never read well. Instead, I was adept at finding books that … Continue reading
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Tagged books, Catch 22, Joanne Harris, Joseph Heller, literary critic, literature, reading, The Gospel of Loki
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Curious Bends – air pollution, menstruation, self-admiration and more
1. The air that Indians breathe is dangerously toxic “Last year the WHO assessed 1,622 cities worldwide for PM2.5 and found India home to 13 of the 20 cities with the most polluted air. More cities in India than in China … Continue reading
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Tagged air pollution, airpocalypse, Anju Bobby George, CNR Rao, menstruation taboos, RA Mashelkar, Ramachandra Guha
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Caste, healthcare and statistics
In late November 2014, the esteemed British medical journal The Lancet published an editorial calling for the end of casteism in India to mitigate the deteriorating health of the millions of rural poor, if nothing else. The central argument was that caste was hampering … Continue reading
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Tagged Amartya Sen, Arundhati Roy, casteism, economic status, healthcare, Jean Dreze, The Lancet
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A close encounter with the mid-sized, icy kind
In three days, NASA’s Cassini mission will fly by Saturn’s second-largest moon Rhea. While interest in the Saturnian moons has been hogged by the largest – Titan – Cassini‘s images of Rhea could provide important new information about a class of natural satellites … Continue reading
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Tagged Dione, Enceladus, Galilean moons, Imaging Science Subsystem, NASA Cassini mission, radiolysis, Rhea, surface charging, tidal warming, Titan
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Why JC Bose isn’t Isaac Newton
David Beerling, a botanist at the University of Sheffield, writes in Nature Plants this week that Isaac Newton knew in the 17th century how water moved up from the soil through a plant and onto a leaf centuries before modern botanists discovered … Continue reading
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Tagged Alexander Stepanovich Popov, capillary action, Guglielmo Marconi, Isaac Newton, Jagdish Chandra Bose, Syndics of the Cambridge University Library
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Curious Bends – killer palm oil, bunking homeopathy, India’s sex ed. and more
1. How Indonesia’s palm oil industry is killing people in China and India “In both China and India, air pollution is one consequence of a massive exodus from farm to city that has occurred in recent decades. The change has … Continue reading
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Tagged casual paternity testing, DNA testing, homeopathy, Narendra Modi, palm oil industry, sex education, Simon Singh, solar energy
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