Culture
https://twitter.com/voxdotcom/status/1146773174975156224 This is the second tweet I'm seeing phrased like this. It lacks context and is provocative, perhaps deliberately? It seems to encourage detention centres to find a cheaper way to house asylum seekers instead of saying this is bad no matter what
Scicomm
Say your house on the ground-floor is ankle deep in water – a common sight in most Indian cities during the monsoons. So you grab a pail and start throwing the water out in a four-step process: 1. You dip the empty pail into the water and fill it up 2.
Culture
It is quite bizarre to read Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and be able to understand anything. It is even more bizarre to agree with her views about mundane things like the news or being a little anxious about having a job next year, to find out the toilet bowl is one
Scicomm
In a report published on June 14, 2018, NITI Aayog, a policy think-tank established by the Government of India, claimed that 21 Indian cities would run out of their supply of groundwater by 2020. The report, especially this statistic, went on to be widely cited as a figure representing the
Op-eds
I can't use the terms 'Gaganyaan' and 'Vyomanaut' or 'Gaganaut' in place of 'Indian human spaceflight mission' and 'Indian astronauts' because of the bad taste the use of Hindi leaves on my tongue these days. I speak Hindi
Life notes
It’s a strangely unsettling experience to read about research on an affliction that one has, to understand how scientists are obtaining insights into it using a variety of techniques that allow them to look past the walls of the human and into their mind, so to speak, with the
Scicomm
Yesterday, I learnt the answer is 'yes'. Gravitational waves can be gravitationally lensed. It seems obvious once you think about it, but not something that strikes you (assuming you're not a physicist) right away. When physicists solve problems relating to the spacetime continuum, they imagine it
Op-eds
There’s been a glut of ‘science projects’ that seem to be divorced from their non-technical aspects even when the latter are equally, if not more, important – or maybe it is just a case of these problems always having been around but this author not being able to unsee it
Op-eds
ISRO's Moon rover, which will move around the lunar surface come September (if all goes well), will live and and die in a span of 14 days because that's how long the lithium-ion cells it's equipped with can survive the -160º C-nights at the
Scicomm
Posters for a new TV show called M.O.M. – The Women Behind Mission Mangal, produced by Ekta Kapoor and distributed by AltBalaji, look strange. One poster shows four women, presumably the show's protagonists, flanking a large rocket in the centre that appears to be a Russian Soyuz
Scicomm
Last week, Sophia Gad-Nasr, an astroparticle physicist and PhD student at University of California, Irvine, tweeted this question: https://twitter.com/Astropartigirl/status/1135533079852773376 To which I replied: https://twitter.com/1amnerd/status/1135534980971417600 Once you start thinking about it, this is a really mind-boggling thing. A part of history
Culture
June 5 was World Environment Day, which is presumably why an article entitled 'Hindu roots of modern 'ecology'' was doing the rounds on Twitter, despite having been published in 2016. In the article, its author Viva Kermani writes, Centuries before the appearance of the likes of