Analysis
Thus far, the composition of claims in my pieces has followed a simple pattern, even a rule: I break down a claim into a series of reasons that, when processed in serial fashion, leads up to the final thing. This has made writing pieces easy. As long as I had
Analysis
Shortly after the IPCC published the first installment of its AR6 report, The Wire Science produced a short video explaining the report’s salient points. It swiftly met with some backlash from some scientists, who were miffed that the video spoke about India reducing its carbon dioxide emissions without emphasising
Life notes
I decided to go out this evening. First I went to Bookworm's new setup on Church Street. There, I started skimming the shelves from the first one on the right, moving from right to left, front to back, room by room. I picked up the first book I
Science
If a telescope like the TMT and a big physics experiment like the INO are being stalled for failing to account for the interests and sensibilities of the people already living at or near their planned sites, what should scientists do when they set out to plan for the next
Science
Of all the scientific journals in the wild, there are a few I keep a closer eye on: they publish interesting results but more importantly they have been forward-thinking on matters of scientific publishing and they’ve also displayed a tendency to think out loud (through blog posts, say) and
Science
Dialectics of Nature, Friedrich Engels, 1883 (ed. 1976): … an acquaintance with the historical course of evolution of human thought, with the views on the general inter-connections in the external world expressed at various times, is required by theoretical natural science for the additional reason that it furnishes a criterion of
Analysis
Is there a doctrine or manifesto of cooperative distrust? Because I think that’s what we need today, in the face of reams of government data — almost all of it, in fact — that is untrustworthy, and the only way it can support our democracy is if the public response to
Analysis
The idea that trusting in science involves a lot of faith, instead of reason, is lost on most people. More often than not, as a science journalist, I encounter faith through extreme examples – such as the Bloch sphere (used to represent the state of a qubit) or wave functions ('
Scicomm
During World War I, a British aeronautical engineer named A.A. Griffith noticed something odd about glass. He found that the atomic bonds in glass needed 10,000 megapascals of stress to break apart – but a macroscopic mass of glass could be broken apart by a stress of 100 megapascals.
Scicomm
Tabletop accelerators are an exciting new field of research in which physicists use devices the size of a shoe box, or something just a bit bigger, to accelerate electrons to high energies. The ‘conventional way’ to do this has been to use machines that are as big as small buildings,
Analysis
Continuing from here… Irrespective of Arati Ramesh's words and actions, I find every retraction worth celebrating because how hard-won retractions in general have been, in India and abroad. I don't know how often papers coauthored by Indian scientists are retracted and how high or low that
Op-eds
My take on the NCBS paper being retracted, and the polarised conversation that has erupted around the incident, is here. The following are some points I'd like to add. a. Why didn't the editorial and peer-review teams at Nature Chemical Biology catch the mistakes before the