Scicomm
Why you should care about the Uttarakhand floods
There is a complex interplay of factors at work, and it's important to understand each one for a few reasons.
VM
Analysis
A new way to harass editors?
There’s a new way to harass editors – or perhaps it’s an old way that we’re just finding out about, first-hand. We know that repressive governments have started using the US’s infamous Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as a new means to censor content they do not
Analysis
Will this blog be online a hundred years from today?
For almost two weeks now, we at The Wire have been dealing with a complaint that someone from Maharashtra lodged against us with Amazon Web Services (AWS), our sites’ host, for allegedly copying one paragraph in one article sans consent from a source that the complainant allegedly owns, and thus
Analysis
The great Nobel Prize hypocrisy
Katie Langin's report for Science on October 12 is an eye-opening account of one reason why the committees that pick every year's Nobel Prize winners almost never pick women: because they aren't nominated. Given the Nobel Foundation's frustrating policy of secrecy, there
Analysis
Are major science prizes a form of philanthropy?
The Association for the Advancement of AI conferred its 'Squirrel AI Award' on Cynthia Rudin, and Duke University – her employer – published a press release celebrating it. Here's one para from the release: "Only world-renowned recognitions, such as the Nobel Prize and the A.M. Turing
Science
'Real science'
From ‘The most influential climate science paper of all time’, The Conversation, October 8, 2021 (emphasis added): Manabe, working with various colleagues, went on to write many more seminal climate modelling papers. He set the foundation for today’s global climate modelling efforts. The physics was beguilingly simple so his
Analysis
Political merch from a newsroom
Shekhar Gupta, the editor of The Print, shared the following image on his Instagram profile a couple days ago: The post had the following note: Since we so love politics at ThePrint, we are developing a range of gifting merchandise. This mug is one such example. In the course of
Analysis
India and the 2021 medicine Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for 2021 has been awarded to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for discovering the receptors in the human body responsible for our ability to feel heat and cold. Science Central to the discovery of how we sense temperature is a chemical compound called
Analysis
ISRO's national interest bullshit
For data and other objects, like images and videos, it places in the public domain, the Indian government attaches the GODL license – short for ‘government open data license’. The terms of this license are fairly straightforward: that … all users are provided a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, adapt, publish
Analysis
The Nobel Prize, its men and climate change
The sciences part of this year’s Nobel Prize announcements have concluded. These are the new laureates: * Physics – Syukuro Manabe 🇯🇵 🇺🇸, Klaus Hasselmann 🇩🇪 and Giorgio Parisi 🇮🇹 * Chemistry – Benjamin List 🇩🇪 and David W.C. MacMillan 🇬🇧 * Medicine/physiology – David Julius 🇺🇸 and Ardem Patapoutian 🇺🇸 I have yet to come across a more overt vestment
Science
Making a good drug
Priyanka Pulla has a new blog, and in her first post, she writes about her report in Mint on nitrosamine contamination in some Indian drugs and answers two follow-up questions she received from readers. One of these answers contains the following portion, describing what exactly a drug-maker needs to do
Analysis
Railroad to zealotry
"It would not be unusual for finger-stick testing to be met with skepticism," says a spokesman for Theranos. "Patents from that period explain Elizabeth’s ideas and were foundational for the company’s current technologies." Vanity Fair received this statement from Theranos, the company entrepreneur Elizabeth