Scientists discover 100 potential new deep-sea species, including mystery creature

Marine researchers on a mission to record life hidden in the world’s oceans have reported they found about 100 potential new species — including one mystery starlike creature. The expedition team focused its investigation on the 500-mile (800-kilometer) long Bounty Trough, a little-explored part of the ocean off the coast of New Zealand, east of… Read More Scientists discover 100 potential new deep-sea species, including mystery creature

Proposal on Anthropocene as new chapter in Earth’s history will go no further

Scientists have voted against a proposal to declare a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene to reflect how profoundly human activity has altered the planet. By Katie Hunt, CNN The proposal was rejected by members of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, which is part of the International Union of Geological Sciences, according to three voting members of the… Read More Proposal on Anthropocene as new chapter in Earth’s history will go no further

‘Baba’ – A Personal Tribute to Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi, by A. L. Basham

NB: D. D. Kosambi (1907-1966) was one of India’s most accomplished intellectuals. Hailing from Goa, he was a polyglot familiar with Konkani, Marathi, Hindi, Sanskrit, Pali, English, French, Italian and German (I may have missed some languages). He was a mathematician, statistician, geneticist, philologist, physicist, numismatist, archaeologist, historian and public intellectual (find a biography here). He… Read More ‘Baba’ – A Personal Tribute to Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi, by A. L. Basham

Toys from Trash: Teaching kids science using everyday objects / Visit Arvind Gupta’s Archive

First posted January 24, 2014 The road to the offices inside Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics’ (IUCAA) Children Science Centre in Pune passes through a well-set, well-manicured lawn past the administrative buildings of the place. The tranquil atmosphere of the campus is broken only by the chaos in the room opposite his office. Noisy… Read More Toys from Trash: Teaching kids science using everyday objects / Visit Arvind Gupta’s Archive

Quantum poetics: Borges and Heisenberg on language and reality

William Egginton As history’s bloodiest war metastasised from Europe outward, two men – a world apart from each other, and coming from profoundly different disciplines – converged on one fundamentally similar idea. One of the men was a poet and short-fiction writer with middling success in his own country but virtually unknown outside its borders.… Read More Quantum poetics: Borges and Heisenberg on language and reality