Balram Bhargava
That the Union government and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had entered into a more intimate, but not necessarily more beneficial, relationship became evident in 2019 when then ISRO chairman K. Sivan trotted out a series of dubious claims to massage the fate of the Chandrayaan 2 mission, whose
2022 has been my worst on the record on several fronts. I had COVID-19 in the first month, which did a freaky number on my heart. My unexplained weight loss from 2021 continued its run into six months of 2022 before stopping suddenly, although all test reports came back normal
IMRaD structure
This prompt arose in response to Stuart Ritchie’s response to a suggestion in an editorial “first published last year but currently getting some attention on Twitter” – that scientists should write their scientific papers as if they were telling a story, with a beginning, middle and end. The act of
* ‘It was a set-up, we were fooled’: the coal mine that ate an Indian village * Stanford hates fun * Concrete Built The Modern World. Now It’s Destroying It. * I Don’t Want to Be an Internet Person * Has the UN climate change conference gotten too big to work? * Inside the
B mesons
One particle in the big zoo of subatomic particles is the B meson. It has a very short lifetime once it’s created. In rare instances it decays to three lighter particles: a kaon, a lepton and an anti-lepton. There are many types of leptons and anti-leptons. Two are electrons/
central hotspot ignition
My explainer/analysis of the US nuclear fusion breakthrough was published today. Some stuff didn’t make it to the final draft for space and tone constraints; I’m publishing that below. 1. While most US government officials present at the announcement of the NIF’s results, including the president’
astro-tourism
This is welcome news: The cluster of six hamlets of #Hanle – Bhok, Shado, Punguk, Khuldo, Naga & Tibetan Refugee habitations within the #Changthang Wildlife Sanctuary situated around the Indian Astronomical Observatory of the @IIABengaluru have been NOTIFIED as "Hanle Dark Sky Reserve"@lg_ladakh pic.twitter.com/SIsQ5Z0oEd
climate finance
At 8.30 pm on December 13, US Department of Energy officials announced that the federally funded National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California had conducted a fusion test in which the energy yield was greater than that supplied to start it. All of
Astronomy
We need to reconsider where the notion that “science benefits all humans” comes from and whether it is really beneficial. I was prompted to this after coming upon a short article in Sky & Telescope about the Holmdel Horn antenna in New Jersey being threatened by a local redevelopment plan.
* Artist Feeds Her Childhood Diary Into an AI Chatbot — And Has a Moving Conversation With Her Younger Self * Giant satellite outshines stars, sparking fresh concerns for astronomers * Does the Peer Review Process Need Blockchain? * The Ants Have Not Read Kant: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid – opening line: “Though he could
Boltzmann constant
What does it mean to say that the speed of light is 1? We know the speed of light in the vacuum of space to be 299,792,458 m/s – or about 300,000 km/s. It’s a quantity of speed that’s very hard to visualise with
academic diversity
An investigation by Science has found that, today, just 3% of “PhD programs in eight disciplines at 50 top-ranked US universities” require applicants’ GRE scores, “compared with 84% four years ago”. This is good news about a test whose purpose I could never understand: first as a student who had
