Stories by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Elizabeth Kolbert combines the sharp observational powers of a field biologist with the literary skill of a seasoned and thoughtful writer.

In the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson has a nice review of Mario Livio’s readable book on scientific blunders committed by great scientists.

The body of men and women who built the atomic bomb was vast, diverse, talented and multitudinous. Every conceivable kind of professional – from theoretical physics to plumber – worked on the Manhattan Project for three years over an enterprise that spread across the country and equalled the US automobile industry in its marshaling of [...]

Pedro Ferreira’s book “The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity” essentially tells us what other people did with Einstein’s general theory of relativity after he developed it.

This is part 4 of a series of posts delving into the fundamental scientific challenges in drug discovery. Here are the other parts:1, 2, 3.

A few people seem unhappy with my previous post in which I made the contention that falsification as a philosophy is much less relevant to chemistry than to physics, especially when chemists make molecules.

One of the answers to Edge.org’s question “What scientific idea is ready for retirement”? is by physicist Sean Carroll. Carroll takes on an idea from the philosophy of science that’s usually considered a given: falsification.

Robert Oppenheimer’s greatest contribution to physics was one that he wanted nothing to do with for the rest of his life. In 1939 Oppenheimer and his student Hartland Snyder published a paper in the same issue of the Physical Review that featured Niels Bohr and John Wheeler’s seminal article on the mechanism of nuclear fission [...]

Physics, unlike biology or geology, was not considered to be a historical science until now. Physicists have prided themselves on being able to derive the vast bulk of phenomena in the universe from first principles.

Edward Teller was born on this day 106 years ago. Teller is best known to the general public for two things: his reputation as the “father of the hydrogen bomb” and as a key villain in the story of the downfall of Robert Oppenheimer.

Every year since 1998, Big Questions guru John Brockman has posed one big question on Edge.org and gotten about forty or fifty of the world’s leading thinkers to come up with their own answers.

Popular wisdom holds that caffeine enhances learning, alertness and retention, leading millions to consume coffee or caffeinated drinks before a challenging learning task such as attending a business strategy meeting or a demanding scientific presentation.

That’s Vaclav Smil, the prolific University of Manitoba thinker writing in this month’s issue of Scientific American.When Smil says something I usually listen.

I just want to highlight this illuminating infographic by James Powell in which, based on more than 2000 peer-reviewed publications, he counts the number of authors from November, 2012 to December, 2013 who explicitly deny global warming (that is, who propose a fundamentally different reason for temperature rise than anthropogenic CO2).

This is part 3 of a series of posts delving into the fundamental scientific challenges in drug discovery. Here are the other parts: 1, 2. Any number of thrillers or action movies should convince us that the first and most important stratagem in defeating an enemy is getting inside his fortress or camp.

This is part 2 of a series of posts delving into the fundamental scientific challenges in drug discovery. Part 1 is here. Drugs from the forest.

This is part 1 of a series of posts delving into the fundamental scientific challenges in drug discovery. Often you will hear people talking about why drugs are expensive: it’s the greedy pharmaceutical companies, the patent system, the government, capitalism itself.

The most succinct encapsulation of the value of curiosity to practical pursuits came from Michael Faraday; when asked by William Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer, about the utility of electricity, Faraday is purported to have replied, One day, sir, you may tax it.

In the summer of 1956, a handful of men gathered in a former little red schoolhouse in San Diego. These men were among the most imaginative scientists and engineers of their generation.

Hans Bethe was one of the greatest and most versatile scientists of the twentieth century. The sheer magnitude of his scientific accomplishments ranging across almost every field of theoretical physics almost defies belief; he was probably the last “universalist”, a man who could solve virtually any physics problem that came his way.

I was a mere toddler in the early 1980s when they announced the “golden age of computational drug design”. Now I may have been a toddler, but I often hear stories about the impending golden age from misty-eyed veterans in the field.

Alex Wellerstein who is a historian of nuclear science has some cogent thoughts that feed into what has long since been a pet peeve of mine: the tendency for politicians, the media and scientists themselves to compare every large-scale government science or technology enterprise to the famed Manhattan Project.

“Chemistry”, declared Roger Kornberg in an interview, “is the queen of all sciences. Our best hope of applying physical principles to the world around us is at the level of chemistry.

British biochemist Fred Sanger died today at 95. He’s the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in chemistry, an achievement that is unlikely to be surpassed anytime soon.