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The Wire June 27, 2015 Breathing in Beijing could be like passive smoking without the short-lived pleasure of a tobacco-high. Writing in The Guardian in December 2014, Oliver Wainwright described an atmosphere akin to one in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion - instead of radioactive particles and clouds of
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"I bet @1amnerd disagrees with this" was how Kapil Subramanian's piece in The Hindu today was pointed out to me on Twitter. Titled 'India must look beyond neutrinos', the piece examines if India should be a "global leader in science" and if
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The Wire June 22, 2015 It may not look like much, but this heavily pixelated GIF image is cause for celebration. It effectively cost a robotic space probe more than nine years of travel and $600 million in manufacturing and operational charges. But then again, that's not why
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The Wire June 22, 2015 To the north, India is flanked by two giant groundwater aquifers - the Indus Basin to the west and the Ganges-Brahmaputra Basin to the east. Between them, they underlie a surface area of over 2.2 million sq. km and water from them supports the
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The Wire June 19, 2015 A group of hackers calling itself AnonOps India on Thursday tweeted what it called evidence of the Reliance Jio Chat app transmitting geolocation data to Chinese servers – a potentially illegal act that compromises user privacy because the data is being transmitted through an unsecured connection.
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The Wire June 19, 2015 On Thursday, NASA okayed the development of a probe to Jupiter’s moon Europa, currently planned for the mid-2020s, to investigate if it has conditions suitable for life. The milestone parallels the European Space Agency’s JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) mission, also planned for
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The Wire June 16, 2015 On June 9, The Wire broke the story of a Bengaluru-based programmer who’d revealed that an Israeli company was injecting malicious JavaScript code into websites visited on Airtel’s 3G network. Thejesh GN had uploaded the script and screenshots of where he found it
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The Wire June 15, 2015 When the first installment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy was released in 2001, it introduced a whole new generation to the ageless charms of Christopher Lee. Far removed from the often campy Dracula that an earlier set of filmgoers loved him for, he
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The Wire June 9, 2015 In an intriguing case of abuse, a Bengaluru-based programmer was on Monday threatened with a criminal lawsuit for attempting to expose an avaricious program that violated net neutrality. On June 3, Thejesh GN, an activist and programmer, published screenshots and some text explaining how the
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1. Inside the mind of the man behind Google's most important products "So when Pichai talks about the next billion people about to come online with smartphones, I get the impression that, for him, Google’s monetization strategy really is secondary to Pichai's stated goal:
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The Wire June 7, 2015 In 1968, the New England Journal of Medicine published a letter from Robert Ho Man Kwok, a doctor in Maryland. Kwok wrote that he experienced symptoms like an allergic reaction every time he ate at a local Chinese restaurant, but that he didn’t know
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The Wire June 4, 2015 From behind the thick curtains of the Indian Meteorological Department’s offices, it was announced on June 2 that the monsoon forecast for 2015 was being revised from 93% to 88% of the long-period average (LPA), ringing in fears of a drought. The LPA hovers