Op-eds
The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has proposed a new textbook that will discuss the 'Indian knowledge system' via a number of pseudoscientific claims about the supposed inventions and discoveries of ancient India, The Print reported on September 26. The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD)
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On September 10, a US court settled an increasingly churlish patent dispute between two research institutions in the country, the University of California (UC) in Berkeley and the Broad Institute, Massachusetts, with great consequence for the commercial use of a powerful gene-editing technology called CRISPR-Cas9. The dispute centred on CRISPR’
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The Statesman‘s editorial on India’s human spaceflight programme ends with the following line: Only after placing the seventh and the last satellite in the NavIC system costing Rs 1,400 crore did ISRO realise the atomic clocks in the satellites had become dysfunctional, rendering the fleet a dud.
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“Homosexual carnal intercourse between two consenting adults” is legal in India now. It wasn’t for lack of reason or scientific data that the item of legislation that rendered sodomy illegal – Section 377 – had been retained for so long. Instead, it was more a question of whether sodomy offended public
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According to Biplab Deb, the chief minister of Tripura, the oxygen content of water will increase if ducks swim in it. [ Satire begins here ] This is a sensational new discovery that has drastic implications for Earth's future. The lawmaker's thinking suggests it might have something to
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There's only one absolute zero but there are multiple absolute 'hots', depending on the temperature at which various theories of physics break down. This is an interesting conception because, while absolute zero is very well-defined and perfectly understood, absolute hot simply stands for the exact opposite
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Physicists created a Bose-Einstein condensate of chromium atoms, ensured the atomic spins were each aligned 90º to the condensate's plane, applied a magnetic field gradient and separated the atoms by a small but relatively significant distance, fired radio pulses at the condensate to get the atoms' spins
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Scientists have combined one atom of sodium (Na) and one of caesium (Cs) to form one molecule of NaCs, achieving the most precisely controlled chemical reaction in history. They were able to achieve this using a fascinating bit of technology called a magneto-optical trap. While the trap itself has a
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Various dark matter detectors around the world, massive particle accelerators and colliders, powerful telescopes on the ground and in space all have their distinct agendas but ultimately what unites them is humankind's quest to understand what the hell this universe is on about. There are unanswered questions in
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When I fly, I always fly IndiGo. They’re not perfect but they and their services have become familiar, from their website (where I book my tickets) to when I exit the airport at my destination. The efficiency with which the IndiGo staff works – rather the economy of processes they
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My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. … The presence of others can only inhibit this process, since creation is embarrassing. – Isaac Asimov (source) Be it far from me to fall for a behavioural studies paper that's not yet been replicated, and much
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K. VijayRaghavan, India’s new principal scientific advisor to the Government of India, has brought a lot of hope with him into the role as a result of his illustrious career as a biologist and former secretaryship with the Department of Biotechnology. Many stakeholders of the scientific establishment are already