Avoiding 'muddled science' in the newsroom
On April 23, I was part of a webinar called ProtoCall, organised by Pro.to with the support of International Centre for Journalists and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative. It happens once a wee…
scientific research
18 posts
Freeman Dyson's PhD
The physicist, thinker and writer Freeman Dyson passed away on February 28, 2020, at the age of 96. I wrote his obituary for The Wire Science; excerpt: The 1965 Nobel Prize for the development of [qu…
The scientist as inadvertent loser
Twice this week, I'd had occasion to write about how science is an immutably human enterprise and therefore some of its loftier ideals are aspirational at best, and about how transparency is one o…
The chrysalis that isn't there
I wrote the following post while listening to this track. Perhaps you will enjoy reading it to the same sounds. Otherwise, please consider it a whimsical recommendation. :) I should really start keep…
A science for the non-1%
David Michaels, an epidemiologist and a former US assistant secretary of labour for occupational safety and health under Barack Obama, writes in the Boston Review: [Product defence] operations have o…
The not-so-obvious obvious
If your job requires you to pore through a dozen or two scientific papers every month – as mine does – you'll start to notice a few every now and then couching a somewhat well-known fact in study-…
How science is presented and consumed on Facebook
This post is a breakdown of the Pew study titled The Science People See on Social Media, published March 21, 2018. Without further ado… or Is popularity the best way to judge if a Facebook page coun…
By the way: the Chekhov's gun and the science article
"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there." (source) This is the principle of the Chekhov's…
Cybersecurity in space
Physical access to an internet-enabled object is no longer necessary to mess with it.…
Vanilla entertainment
One of the first, and most important in hindsight, bits of advice I got from the journalist Siddharth Varadarajan was about how to choose what to write: "Write what you'd like to read" (…
From unboiling eggs to the effects of intense kissing, IgNobel Prizes reward good ol' curiosity
The year's IgNobel Awards were held on September 17, and rewarded research that defines a kind of excellence that still impacts society without managing the sobriety of character that often bags t…
A "Dear ISRO" moment
Even if ISRO has launched a spacecraft to Mars, the payload limit still stands in the way of taking full advantage of scientific interest on the ground. But apparently now isn't the time to think about that...…