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We don't have a problem with the West, we're just obsessed with it
How much do we not know about what Indian researchers are doing simply because Western scientists haven't written to some of them?
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Life notes
Dealing with plagiarism? Look at thy neighbour
Four doctors affiliated with Kathmandu University (KU) in Nepal are going to be fired because they plagiarised data in two papers. The papers were retracted last year from the Bali Medical Journal, where they had been published. A dean at the university, Dipak Shrestha, told a media outlet that the
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To watch 'The Post'
I read a few reviews of The Post. Based on what the critics are saying, it seems the film has at least the potential to raise the spirits of many journalists today who could use a leg up. That said, I do resent that some of my friends and peers
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Limitations of the Finkbeiner test
This post was republished on The Wire on January 8, 2018. The Finkbeiner test, named for science writer Ann Finkbeiner, was created to check whether a profile of a female scientist published by a mainstream news outlet was produced in the first place because its subject was a woman. It&
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WordPress's ineptitude
As some of you might know, I've been having some issues with WordPress.com in terms of their UX, their service as well as a few outages. I've been on the platform for almost a decade now, during which my account has been suspended twice for
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Happy new year!
2017 was a blast. Lots of things happened. The world became a shittier place in many ways and better in a few. Mostly, Earth just went around the Sun once more, and from what we know, it's going to be doing that for a while. But here'
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A shorter article about short gamma ray bursts lights up little
* Identify a simple and well-defined question * Describe the question and answer it * Get the fuck out Writing with these three rules in mind makes for a good science article. You stick to the point, you know what details to include and what to leave out and, most importantly, you set
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The journey of a crow and the story of a black hole
The Washington Post has a review, and introduction therewith, of a curious new book called Ka, authored by John Crowley (acclaimed author of Great Work of Time). It is narrated from the POV of a crow named Dar Oakley, who journeys repeatedly into the realm of the dead with a
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In solidarity with Nautilus's writers
In April this year, Undark published a piece that caught me by surprise: Nautilus magazine was going broke. Actually, it wasn't a surprise that lasted long. Nautilus, to me, had been doing a commendable job of being 'the New Yorker version of the Scientific American', an
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Ruins of the Sutlej avulsion paper's coverage
Reporting on the new Indus civilisation study out of IIT-K and Imperial College London was an interesting experience because it afforded an opportunity to discover how the technical fields of sedimentology and hydrodynamics can help understand the different ways in which a civilisation can grow. And also how "fluviodeltaic
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The language and bullshitness of 'a nearly unreadable paper'
Earlier today, the Retraction Watch mailing list highlighted a strange paper written by a V.M. Das disputing the widely accepted fact that our body clocks are regulated by the gene-level circadian rhythm. The paper is utter bullshit. Sample its breathless title: 'Nobel Prize Physiology 2017 (for their discoveries
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The blog and the social media
Because The Wire had signed up to be some kind of A-listed publisher with Facebook, The Wire's staff was required to create Facebook Pages under each writer/editor's name. So I created the 'Vasudevan Mukunth' page. Then, about 10 days ago, Facebook began to