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Every week, I create a science quiz for The Hindu newspaper’s In School product. It consists of 10 questions and only developments from the week preceding its day of publication (Monday). The answers are at the end. (This week's quiz is astronomy-heavy.) 1. July 20, 2014, was
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Curious Bends is a weekly newsletter about science, tech., data and India. Akshat Rathi and I curate it. You can subscribe to it here. If have feedback, suggestions, or would just generally like to get in touch, just email us. 1. The puzzle of Delhi's air pollution Delhi
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Billing its mission as a journey to the beginning of the Solar System, the NASA Dawn probe has revealed more information about the asteroid Vesta that has scientists both eager and cautious about what they have learned. The second largest in the belt of bodies between the orbits of Mars
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I hate travelling. But don't confuse that with going to new places and meeting new people. I don't mind that. What I dislike is catching a train or a flight and mingling with other people on the move, in train stations and airports, while waiting for
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In a Nature article, Praveen Chaddah argues that textual plagiarism entails that the offending paper only carry a correction and not be retracted because that makes the useful ideas and results in the paper unavailable. On the face of it, this is an argument that draws a distinction between the
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I flew from Bangalore to Delhi on Tuesday. The flight was early in the day, at 6, and so I had the wonderful opportunity to watch a sunrise from above a sea of clouds. One very beautiful sight was the presence of uniquely shaped ones, styled like the waves in
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Formatting a motion chart in Google Visualization is as hellish as it's surprising how simple R makes it. One more reason to learn this underrated language. To create this motion chart, I downloaded the data from here (as CSV) and keyed in the following lines in RStudio: emissions
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Every week, I create a science quiz for The Hindu newspaper’s In School product. It consists of 10 questions and only developments from the week preceding its day of publication (Monday). The answers are at the end. 1. The _______ region of southwest China is some 4.5 km above
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An Open Access Policy Committee has drafted a policy to enhance access to publicly funded research by setting up a national open access (OA) repository under the oversight of the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST). Reproduced in full here: [scribd id=232706860 key=
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Two years ago, physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider first announced the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle, setting the high-energy physics community atwitter. And it was only a couple weeks ago that physicists also announced that the particle was definitely the one predicted by the sturdy Standard Model
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Facebook, Twitter, email, WordPress, Instagram, online banking, the list goes on... Offline, you're one person maintaining (presumably) one identity. On the web, you have many of them. All of them might point at you, but they're still distinct packets of data floating through different websites. Within