Tag: science

Masked cancer drug trains immune system to kill tumors while sparing healthy tissues

Many cancer treatments are notoriously savage on the body. Drugs often attack both healthy cells and tumor cells, causing a plethora of side effects. Immunotherapies that help the immune system recognize and attack cancer cells are no different. Though they have prolonged the lives of countless patients, they work in only a subset of patients.… Read More Masked cancer drug trains immune system to kill tumors while sparing healthy tissues

Dilip

Apocalypse now? The alarming effects of the global food crisis

Apocalypse is an alarming idea, commonly taken to denote catastrophic destruction foreshadowing the end of the world. But in the original Greek, apokálypsis means a revelation or an uncovering. One vernacular definition is “to take the lid off something”.  That latter feat is exactly what Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, achieved last week,… Read More Apocalypse now? The alarming effects of the global food crisis

Dilip

Book Review: “Fashionable Nonsense” 20 Years Later

In 1996 physicist Alan Sokal published a seemingly pretentious but otherwise innocuous paper entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity in the postmodern journal Social Text. After its publication, Sokal announced that the paper was designed as a deliberate parody of post-modernism’s appropriation of scientific jargon. It was filled with largely meaningless or even… Read More Book Review: “Fashionable Nonsense” 20 Years Later

Dilip

Thawing permafrost is roiling the Arctic landscape, driven by a hidden world of changes / Researchers identified over 5,500 new viruses in the ocean

Across the Arctic, strange things are happening to the landscape. Massive lakes, several square miles in size, have disappeared in the span of a few days. Hillsides slump. Ice-rich ground collapses, leaving the landscape wavy where it once was flat, and in some locations creating vast fields of large, sunken polygons. It’s evidence that permafrost,… Read More Thawing permafrost is roiling the Arctic landscape, driven by a hidden world of changes / Researchers identified over 5,500 new viruses in the ocean

Dilip

Péter Krekó: Learning to live with the madness

Decades of political campaigning against climate science and medicine have made public health a battleground of beliefs. Vaccine hesitancy, as seen in eastern Europe, based on distrust in authority, can’t be solved with rationality alone. So what might the antidote be?    Rejecting science is not so much a grass-roots movement, says Péter Krekó, in… Read More Péter Krekó: Learning to live with the madness

Dilip

Shobhit Mahajan: Peddling of anti-scientific beliefs by academia must worry us

The IITs have been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. This time it is not about the fat pay packets their students have got in the institute placements, but about ghosts and steppe people invading, or rather not invading, Bharatvarsh. First, the ghosts. The director of an IIT posted a video on… Read More Shobhit Mahajan: Peddling of anti-scientific beliefs by academia must worry us

Dilip

Chemical pollution exceeds safe planetary limit

The production and release of plastics, pesticides, industrial compounds, antibiotics and other pollutants is now happening so fast and on such a large scale that it has exceeded the planetary boundary for chemical pollution, the safe limit for humanity, a new study claims. We asked Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, a PhD candidate at Stockholm University and one… Read More Chemical pollution exceeds safe planetary limit

Dilip

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Is midnight upon us? Doomsday Clock panel to set risk of global catastrophe

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to unveil its measure of how close human civilisation is to the edge of extinctionOn 24 October 1962, an American nuclear chemist, Harrison Brown, started to pen a guest editorial for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists just as the Cuban missile crisis reached its climax. “I am writing on… Read More Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Is midnight upon us? Doomsday Clock panel to set risk of global catastrophe

Dilip