COVID-19 origins
The SARS-CoV-2 red herring
It's no longer about science
Latest
chiral molecules
Visual science journalism’s DNA twist
Your left hand and right hand are mirror-images of each other. You can’t superimpose them completely even after all manner of rotations and translations. Only mirroring them works. The same thing can happen to some molecules. When two molecules are identical in every way except their geometric structure in
Department of Science and Technology
ONOS and the "OA transformation"
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 press release saying the Union Cabinet had approved the
Elon Musk
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 on “solving problems on Earth”. Considering Earth would always have
advertisements
Keep the crap going
Have you seen the new ads for Google Gemini? In one version, just as a young employee is grabbing her fast-food lunch, she notices her snooty boss get on an elevator. So she drops her sandwich, rushes to meet her just as the doors are about to close, and submits
Bharatiya Janata Party
Correlation isn’t causation — the EVM edition
The space to disagree with the Election Commission’s position vis-à-vis the integrity of electronic voting machines without finding oneself backtracking into the Congress or the BJP camps is shrinking, and both national parties as well as the Supreme Court have been wilfully engendering this state of affairs at the
Vettaiyan
Review: ‘Vettaiyan’ (2024)
Watch it, but fast-forward through some parts. Vettaiyan steers clear of unconditionally qualifying “encounter killings” as the only way out — a line many Tamil films have been only too happy to tout of late. There’s in fact an instructive passage at the film’s start that’s probably deliberate.
bicycle
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 the problem, whatever it was, and the IT team
animal foraging
A not-so-random walk through random walks
Though I’ve been interested of late with the idea of random walks, I was introduced to the concept when, more than two decades ago, I stumbled across Conway’s Game of Life, the cellular automaton built by John Conway in 1970. A cellular automaton is a grid of cells
air pollution
Keeper of the foul air
This city is essentially uninhabitable from November to January inclusive and barely liveable the rest of the year. Should it even remain the nation’s capital? I realise Shashi Tharoor is frustrated here — revealing the increasingly evident gap between what the Delhi and the Indian governments can do about air
comorbidities
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 the number of lives lost during and
demolition
Rule o flaw — part III
Make sure you've read part I and part II. The project of demolishing the building opposite my house has taken a new turn. As part of the deal between me and my neighbours and the contractor, Monday, November 18, was his deadline to finish the part of the
