Acharya Balkrishna
On February 27, a bench of the Supreme Court upbraided Patanjali Ayurved and its chairman Acharya Balkrishna for continuing to disparage systems of medicine other than Ayurveda (technically, what it calls Ayurveda) and claiming its products offer “permanent relief” from “blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis, asthma and obesity” in its advertisements,
Department of Space
This post is in response to a question on Reddit about why the Indian government won’t increase ISRO’s space budget. There’s a good analogy in India’s research budget. As a share of the GDP, the national expenditure on R&D has fallen significantly since 1996,
business model
Earlier this year, Varun Bhatta, assistant professor of philosophy at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, reached out to ask me some questions for something he was writing about the representation of philosophical ideas in journalism. He interviewed others as well and subsequently wrote and published his
fascism
When a user asked, “Is modi a fascist”, Gemini AI responded that Mr. Modi had “been accused of implementing policies that some experts have characterized as fascist”. “These are direct violations of Rule 3(1)(b) of [the IT Rules, 2021] and violations of several provisions of the Criminal code,
Artemis Accords
A historian of science I follow on Twitter recently retweeted this striking comment: Capitalism's critics want to portray it as un-social and un-human when in reality it is one of the most profound forms of human cooperation. For example, the number of people who contributed to these hyper-advanced
adversarial journalism
One dubious but vigorous narrative that has emerged around Poonam Pandey’s “death” and subsequent return to life is that the mainstream media will publish “anything”. To be sure, there were broadly two kinds of news reports after the post appeared on her Instagram handle claiming Pandey had died of
ASAT test
On January 22, in a ceremony led by Prime Minister and now high-priest Narendra Modi, priests and officials allegedly consecrated the idol of Lord Ram at the new temple in Ayodhya, with many celebrities in attendance. (‘Alleged’ because I don’t know if it’s a legitimate consecration, given the
CONDESAN
Dog bites man isn’t news. Man bites dog is news. I’m reminded of this adage of the news industry – and Nambi Narayanan’s comment in August 2022 – when I read reports like ‘Explosion of violence in Ecuador shuts down science’ (Science, January 13, 2024). An “explosion of violence”
Ayodhya
The Surya Tilak project had courted controversy in the past with Trinamool Congress’s Mahua Moitra flagging it on social media in November 2021. The CSIR officials, however, defended the project arguing the scientific calculations that went into making the system. ‘Surya Tilak at Ram temple at the India International
Bloch oscillation
Simply place two superconductors very close to each other, separated by a small gap, and you’ll have taken a big step towards an important piece of technology called a Josephson junction. When the two superconductors are close to each other and exposed to electromagnetic radiation in the microwave frequency
A Cricketing View
In today’s edition of The Hindu, Rebecca Rose Varghese and Vignesh Radhakrishnan have a particularly noteworthy edition of their ‘Data Point’ column – ‘noteworthy’ because they’ve used data to make concrete something we’ve all been feeling for a while, in the way we sometimes know something to be
Achal Agrawal
A paper about open-access fees in India published recently in the journal Current Science has repeatedly surfaced in my networks over some problems with it. The paper is entitled ‘Publications in gold open access and article processing charge expenditure: evidence from Indian scholarly output’ and is authored by Raj Kishor
