Life notes
No, not that sex. Biological sex. In the past eight years, an astounding 80 percent of those killed by lightning strikes have been men. This astonishing statistic is from an article in Bustle, from 2014 – but it quickly stops being astonishing. It seems lightning preferred men because they were more
Life notes
What is a short story? If you were to visualise the completeness of a 'long-story' as arcs of different lengths on a circle, then I would say a finished novel could be 90% of the circumference. Or an epic fantasy series like Lord of the Rings to be
Op-eds
Arup Dasgupta's incisive article about ISRO's human spaceflight mission, published on The Wire Science yesterday, is drawing a lot of civil, critical engagement from our readers. While this is good news from the newsroom's perspective – civil engagement is always golden – I'd like
Culture
Stanley Donen, who co-directed the famous 1952 Hollywood film Singin' in the Rain with Gene Kelly, passed away on February 21. Though it released to moderate success at first, the film went on to become a cult classic. The titular song, first composed in 1929 and which "inspired&
Scicomm
Science Day isn’t a very meaningful occasion in and of itself. It is the day C.V. Raman discovered the light-scattering effect named for him. Raman won a Nobel Prize for his discovery, and – by commemorating February 28 as ‘Science Day’ – India has come to celebrate the Nobel Prize
Scicomm
Immense though the threat of war between India and Pakistan is right now, it's not the only thing happening in the world. This is The Wire's lead story right now: No better way to give peace a chance than to talk about all the different things
Science
I wrote the following analysis for chinaindiadialogue.com and China Pictorial. A big thank you to Mithila Phadke for the opportunity and for working on the text to make it sharper and more readable. Beyond the Far Side China has always publicly advocated for the peaceful use of outer space.
Science
On February 12, K. VijayRaghavan, the principal scientific advisor to the Government of India, announced that India would join a global consortium of countries that is attempting to standardise the way their scientists publish their papers, such that the papers are freely available to the public. The consortium is grounded
Culture
In an interview to The Wire Science last month, Venki Ramakrishnan, the molecular biologist, acknowledged that Indians had a bizarre relationship with the fact that he was a Nobel laureate: I’d left India when I was 19 I gave a lecture in honour of G.N. Ramachandran in 2008
Scicomm
On January 30, the Union ministry of finance announced a 24-25% hike in the junior (JRF) and senior research fellowships (SRF) amounts effective from January 1, 2019. The decision had been prompted by a longstanding demand of India’s community of young scholars, who availed these fellowships to support themselves
Scicomm
A recent article in Scientific American on the benefits of “proper breathing” for overall health has ignited anger across social media, with many in India accusing the magazine of rebranding or even appropriating the ancient Indian breathing technique of ‘pranayama’. Detailed description of the benefits of the 2500-year-old Indian technique
Science
After CERN announced the plans for its new supercollider, I was surprised no one wanted to address the elephant in the room: the supercollider's similarity to one announced by China a few months ago. The Chinese machine is called CEPC (Circular Electron Proton Collider) and the CERN machine,