By Shobhit Mahajan Humankind’s fascination with the heavens is as old humankind. The sight of countless stars and the faint band of light which stretches from horizon to horizon must have been the cause of amazement and awe for the earliest homosapien as she trudged along the plains of East Africa. From the hunter-gatherer to… Read More James Webb Telescope: Light on Dark Matter
by Alan Sokal The debate over objectivity and relativism, science and postmodernism, which for the past eight months has been rocking American academic circles — particularly those of the political left — has apparently now arrived in France. And with what a bang! Following Denis Duclos (Le Monde of 3 January), we now have the eminent sociologist… Read More Professor Latour’s Philosophical Mystifications
Lisa-Maria Kellermayr, an Austrian GP, was a doctor who dedicated her life to her patients and was vocal about the risks of Covid-19 on Twitter and in the media. She had endured months of death threats from Covid conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers. Colleagues expressed frustration with the lack of support she received for dealing with… Read More Devi Sridhar: A scientist in the public eye has taken her own life. This has to be a wake-up call
Postmodern ideas have gained the status of absolute truths. Relativism, selectively appropriated into the language of both left and right politics, has metamorphosed into dogma. As oversimplification distorts communication, public trust in scientific fact has eroded. Could renewed ideas of objectivity be a way out? ‘A relativism metamorphosed into dogmatic absolutism is obviously logically incoherent,… Read More Peter Kreko, Alan Sokal: In defence of the objective world
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
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
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
Our excrement is a natural, renewable and sustainable resource – if only we can overcome our visceral disgust of it… Grandpa had a system of sludge distribution. He never filled the buckets fully so that, when he carried them, the sloshing goop wouldn’t spill over onto his boots. Sometimes he carried the buckets by hand,… Read More Lina Zeldovich: The power of shit
What was the name of the female scientist who pioneered the mRNA research behind the success of recent COVID-19 vaccines? Who was that 16th-century catholic nun from whom René Descartes stole the evil demon thought experiment that secured his place in public memory as the father of modern philosophy? I doubt you remember either woman. Their names… Read More Ann-Sophie Barwich: The absent woman
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
After the truth-shower 