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The sciences part of this year’s Nobel Prize announcements have concluded. These are the new laureates: * Physics – Syukuro Manabe 🇯🇵 🇺🇸, Klaus Hasselmann 🇩🇪 and Giorgio Parisi 🇮🇹 * Chemistry – Benjamin List 🇩🇪 and David W.C. MacMillan 🇬🇧 * Medicine/physiology – David Julius 🇺🇸 and Ardem Patapoutian 🇺🇸 I have yet to come across a more overt vestment
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"It would not be unusual for finger-stick testing to be met with skepticism," says a spokesman for Theranos. "Patents from that period explain Elizabeth’s ideas and were foundational for the company’s current technologies." Vanity Fair received this statement from Theranos, the company entrepreneur Elizabeth
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Thus far, the composition of claims in my pieces has followed a simple pattern, even a rule: I break down a claim into a series of reasons that, when processed in serial fashion, leads up to the final thing. This has made writing pieces easy. As long as I had
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Shortly after the IPCC published the first installment of its AR6 report, The Wire Science produced a short video explaining the report’s salient points. It swiftly met with some backlash from some scientists, who were miffed that the video spoke about India reducing its carbon dioxide emissions without emphasising
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Is there a doctrine or manifesto of cooperative distrust? Because I think that’s what we need today, in the face of reams of government data — almost all of it, in fact — that is untrustworthy, and the only way it can support our democracy is if the public response to
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The idea that trusting in science involves a lot of faith, instead of reason, is lost on most people. More often than not, as a science journalist, I encounter faith through extreme examples – such as the Bloch sphere (used to represent the state of a qubit) or wave functions ('
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Continuing from here… Irrespective of Arati Ramesh's words and actions, I find every retraction worth celebrating because how hard-won retractions in general have been, in India and abroad. I don't know how often papers coauthored by Indian scientists are retracted and how high or low that
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The Shycocan Corp. took out a full-page jacket ad in the Times of India on June 22 – the same day The Telegraph (UK) had a story about GBP 2,900 handbags by Gucci that exist only online, in some videogame. The Shycocan product's science is questionable, at best,
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One problem with the debate over the novel coronavirus's "lab leak" origin hypothesis is a problem I'm starting to see in quite a few other areas of pandemic-related analysis and discussion. It's that no one will say why others are wrong, even
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NDTV quoted unnamed sources in the Indian government saying it will be conducting a study to assess the feasibility of deploying the Covishield vaccine in a single-dose regimen instead of continuing the extant double-dose regimen. At any other time, such a statement may have been sufficient to believe the government
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If you want to find mistakes with something, you’ll be able to find them if you tried long enough. That doesn’t inherently make the thing worthless. The only exception I’ve encountered to this truism is the prevailing world-system – which is both fault-ridden and, by virtue of its
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Note: I originally wrote two versions of this article for The Wire; one, a 'newsier' version, was published in June 2020. I'd intended to publish the version below, which is more of a discussion/analysis, sometime last year itself but it slipped my mind. I'