Stories by Ashutosh Jogalekar

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A hundred years ago this day in Sarajevo, disgruntled nationalist Gavrilo Princip fired a shot. An Archduke and his wife died, the world mourned and fulminated, and in a rash of misunderstanding and patriotic throes the nations of Europe went to war with each other, a war that in its calculated butchery exceeded all that [...]

Getting a drug from conception to market is among the riskiest, hardest and most expensive of scientific and human endeavors, often requiring up to ten years of effort and anywhere between 1 and 5 billion dollars.

On September 1, 1939, the same day that Germany attacked Poland and started World War 2, a remarkable paper appeared in the pages of the journal Physical Review.

In my professional field of molecular modeling and drug discovery I often feel like an explorer who has arrived on the shores of a new continent with a very sketchy map in his pocket.

Physicist Sean Carroll has some words of wisdom for physicists who might have less than complimentary things to say about philosophy. The most recent altercation between a physicist and philosophy came from Neil deGrasse Tyson who casually disparaged philosophy in a Q&A session, saying that it can be a time sink and it doesn’t actually [...]

I have been wanting to highlight this review of strategies to make nuclear energy cheap and efficient from the Breakthrough Institute for a while.

At a time when we are still seeing subtle and not-so-subtle opposition to fostering young girls’ interest in STEM disciplines and to women’s mobility in professional science, it’s encouraging to see this ad from Verizon asking parents to not squelch their daughters’ natural curiosity.

Philip Ball who is one of my favorite science writers has a thoughtful rumination on the constant tussle between beauty and truth in science.

A review of Nicholas Wade’s book, “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History“. In this book NYT science writer Nicholas Wade advances two simple premises: firstly, that we should stop looking only toward culture as a determinant of differences between populations and individuals, and secondly, that those who claim that race is only a [...]

One of the greatest breakthroughs in twentieth century biology was the finding that RNA can serve as a catalyst and drive some of life’s essential chemical reactions.

  This month marks the sixty-first anniversary of the publication of the landmark paper on the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick, which appeared in the April 25, 1953 issue of the journal Nature.

Misleading statements and conclusions regarding drug costs and prices are again being thrown around. It started with a post right here on Scientific American Blogs with the title “The Quest: $84,000 Miracle Cure Costs Less Than $150 to Make”.

Y Combinator is the well-known startup incubator that picks promising computer technology startup ideas from a competition every year and seeds them with a few tens of thousands of dollars and dedicated space in Silicon Valley in return for an equity stake.

 This is a guest post from my friend Chris Martin. Chris (chriscmartin.com) studied psychology and music at Davidson College, human-computer interaction at Georgia Tech, and psychology at the College of William and Mary.

Fellow Scientific American blogger John Horgan is at it again. This time he is heralding the end of fundamental physics based on the increasing time lag between Nobel Prizes awarded for fundamental discoveries.

On my computer screen right now are two molecules. They are both large rings with about thirty atoms each, a motley mix of carbons, hydrogens, oxygens and nitrogens.

This is a guest post by my friend Pinkesh Patel, a data scientist at Facebook. Pinkesh has a PhD in physics from Caltech during which he worked on LIGO, the gravitational wave detector.

A few days back I wrote a post explaining why I am all for private support of basic science, especially in an age when government funding and support is flagging.

Last week, the BICEP2 experiment dropped a bombshell in the physics world by announcing potential evidence for gravitational waves from inflation as well as support for the quantization of gravity.

Psychiatric drugs have always been a black box. The complexity of the brain has meant that most successful drugs for treating disorders like depression, psychosis and bipolar disorder were discovered by accident and trial and error rather than rational design.

I was immersed in the American Chemical Society’s national meeting in Dallas this week, which meant that I could not catch more than wisps of the thrilling announcement from cosmology on Monday that could potentially confirm the prediction of inflation.

I am writing from the Dallas airport from where I am heading out back home after a fantastic national meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

Surprises rank high on the list of things that make science a source of everlasting delight. When it comes to being surprised scientists are no different from the general public.