Category Archives: Science
What is ONOS’s (real) problem?
The Indian government set the country’s research community aflutter when it announced the launch of a long-awaited plan to improve research access without announcing many of its salient details as well. On November 25, the Ministry of Education published a … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Op-eds, Science
Tagged article processing charges, Department of Science & Technology, gold open access, green open access, One Nation One Subscription, prestige journals, Principle Scientific Advisor, publish or perish, scholarly publishing, subscription-based journals
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Solve all our problems
This is xkcd #1232. When it came out I remember it was to rebut a particular line of argument against NASA’s lunar and interplanetary missions — that the agency was spending large sums of money that would be better spent … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Science
Tagged Elon Musk, Gaganyaan, game theory, human spaceflight, Indian Space Research Organisation, interplanetary spaceflight, NASA, SpaceX, sustainability, xkcd
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Externalised costs and the human on the bicycle
Remember the most common question the protagonists of the eponymous British sitcom The IT Crowd asked a caller checking why a computer wasn’t working? “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” Nine times out of 10, this fixed … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Science
Tagged bicycle, climate change mitigation, energy efficiency, externalised costs, Scientific American, SS Wilson, The IT Crowd
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Tamil Nadu’s lukewarm heatwave policy
From ‘Tamil Nadu heatwave policy is only a start’, The Hindu, November 21, 2024: Estimates of a heatwave’s deadliness are typically based on the extent to which the ambient temperature deviates from the historical average at a specific location and … Continue reading
Posted in Op-eds, Science
Tagged comorbidities, COVID-19 pandemic, disaster relief, heat injury, heatwave, India Meteorological Department, natural disaster, State Disaster Response Fund, Tamil Nadu
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The farm fires paradox
From The Times of India on November 18, 2024: A curious claim by all means. The scientist, a Hiren Jethva at NASA Goddard, compared data from the Aqua, Suomi-NPP, and GEO-KOMPSAT 2A satellites and reported that the number of farm … Continue reading
An infuriating editorial in Science
I’m not just disappointed with an editorial published by the journal Science on November 14, I’m angry. Irrespective of whether the Republican Party in the US has shifted more or less rightward on specific issues, it has certainly shifted towards … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Science
Tagged COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Trump, John Stuart Mill, Marcia McNutt, Republican Party, Science journal, US National Academy of Sciences
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On the 2024 Nobel Prizes and the Rosalind Lee issue
The Nobel Prizes are a deeply flawed institution both out of touch with science as it is done today and with an outsized influence on scientific practice at the most demanding levels. Yet these relationships all persist with the prizes … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Science
Tagged blue sky research, Gary Ruvkun, Matilda effect, Matthew effect, microRNA, Newcomb Cleveland Prize, Nobel Prize, Nobel Prizes, physics, Rosalind Lee, science communication, Victor Ambros
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Numbed by numbers
Couple things in my news feed this morning that really woke me up — one a startling statistic and the other a reminder of what statistics miss. The first from Nature, ‘How to win a Nobel prize: what kind of … Continue reading
Posted in Science
Tagged Didier Raoult, Elisabeth Bik, John W Strutt, Nobel Prizes, The Hindu
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What can science education do, and what can it not?
On September 29, 2021, The Third Eye published an interview with Milind Sohoni, a teacher at the Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas and at IIT Bombay. (Thanks to @labhopping for bringing it into my feed.) I found it … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Culture, Science
Tagged Anna University, Big Science, class mobility, India-based Neutrino Observatory, Jacques Ellul, Milind Sohoni, science education, social science, spinoff technologies, The Technological Society, The Third Eye
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A cynical archaeology
From ‘ASI submits Bhojshala survey report to Madhya Pradesh High Court’, The Hindu, July 15, 2024: The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) on July 15 submitted its scientific survey report of the disputed Bhojshala-Kamal-Maula mosque complex to the Indore Bench … Continue reading
Posted in Op-eds, Science
Tagged Archaeological Survey of India, archaeology, Bhojshala, Kamal Maula, The Hindu
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