Scicomm
Why you should care about the Uttarakhand floods
There is a complex interplay of factors at work, and it's important to understand each one for a few reasons.
Science
Analysis
The great Nobel Prize hypocrisy
Katie Langin's report for Science on October 12 is an eye-opening account of one reason why the committees that pick every year's Nobel Prize winners almost never pick women: because they aren't nominated. Given the Nobel Foundation's frustrating policy of secrecy, there
Analysis
Are major science prizes a form of philanthropy?
The Association for the Advancement of AI conferred its 'Squirrel AI Award' on Cynthia Rudin, and Duke University – her employer – published a press release celebrating it. Here's one para from the release: "Only world-renowned recognitions, such as the Nobel Prize and the A.M. Turing
Science
'Real science'
From ‘The most influential climate science paper of all time’, The Conversation, October 8, 2021 (emphasis added): Manabe, working with various colleagues, went on to write many more seminal climate modelling papers. He set the foundation for today’s global climate modelling efforts. The physics was beguilingly simple so his
Analysis
India and the 2021 medicine Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for 2021 has been awarded to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for discovering the receptors in the human body responsible for our ability to feel heat and cold. Science Central to the discovery of how we sense temperature is a chemical compound called
Analysis
The Nobel Prize, its men and climate change
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
Science
Making a good drug
Priyanka Pulla has a new blog, and in her first post, she writes about her report in Mint on nitrosamine contamination in some Indian drugs and answers two follow-up questions she received from readers. One of these answers contains the following portion, describing what exactly a drug-maker needs to do
Analysis
Railroad to zealotry
"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
Analysis
Climate: The US needs to do more – and India needs to, too
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
Science
They're trying to build a telescope
If a telescope like the TMT and a big physics experiment like the INO are being stalled for failing to account for the interests and sensibilities of the people already living at or near their planned sites, what should scientists do when they set out to plan for the next
Science
PeerJ's peer-review problem
Of all the scientific journals in the wild, there are a few I keep a closer eye on: they publish interesting results but more importantly they have been forward-thinking on matters of scientific publishing and they’ve also displayed a tendency to think out loud (through blog posts, say) and
Science
Engels, Weinberg
Dialectics of Nature, Friedrich Engels, 1883 (ed. 1976): … an acquaintance with the historical course of evolution of human thought, with the views on the general inter-connections in the external world expressed at various times, is required by theoretical natural science for the additional reason that it furnishes a criterion of