Stories by Ashutosh Jogalekar

The Fundamental Physics prize has again been awarded to sophisticated mathematical speculation disconnected from experimental evidence. The 2012 Fundamental Physics prize was shared among nine physicists, most of who were string theorists. String theorists continue to dominate the awardees of this year’s New Horizons and Frontiers in Physics prizes.

It is often said that chemistry lacks “big questions” like physics and biology. But this is not entirely true. The origin of life is a quintessentially chemical problem, and it’s as big as fundamental questions can get.

Scientific American editor Clara Moskowitz has a nice post showcasing some of the big questions asked by participants at a recent particle physics conference.

Ricardo Heras has a well-written and thought provoking essay in Physics Today in which he asks whether physicists should be individualists or collectivists.

Here is the link to the YouTube video of my panel discussion with Steven Weinberg, Sara Seager and Neil Turok. I was very pleased to have a productive conversation about the future of science with such sparkling and provocative thinkers.

Tomorrow I have the privilege of joining a panel discussion on Big Science with three very distinguished scientists: Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg, MIT astrophysics professor Sara Seager and Perimeter Institute cosmologist Neil Turok.

When the purported discovery of the now infamous “arsenic DNA” bacteria was published, a friend of mine who was studying astrobiology could not stop praising it as an exciting scientific advance.

The last one week has been traumatic for the world of science blogging, journalism and writing. It has certainly been very painful for me, as I am sure it has been for many others, to watch someone who we all regarded as the glue that holds the science communication community together, someone who was the [...]

The discussion in the comments section of a recent post on yesterday’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry reflects one of the more unseemly strains of discourse in the chemistry blog world that I have seen in a while.

It’s always very nice to wake up and see your own professional working field win a Nobel Prize. I am very happy to note that this year’s prize in chemistry has been awarded to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel for their development of “multiscale methods for complex systems”.

The 2013 Nobel Prize for physics was awarded today to two very deserving individuals – Peter Higgs and Francois Englert. But as is rapidly turning out to be the case, the Nobel Prize – and other prizes for that matter – are finding themselves increasingly out of sync with the way science actually works these [...]

In 1985 Freeman Dyson delivered the Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen, Scotland. The lectures were later turned into a book titled “Infinite in All Directions”.

There is an excellent article on the lack of women in science in the NYT by Eileen Pollack which is worth your time. Pollack herself was an embattled physics major at Yale at one point so she is quite well-versed in these issues.

In a stunning and premature decision that is a first in the 113 year history of the august institution, the Nobel Prize Committee in Stockholm today announced the awarding of the 2013 Nobel prize for Physics to the Higgs Boson.

Consider the set of brilliant twentieth century physicists. That’s an impressively large set. Now consider the set of brilliant physicists who contributed important ideas to several diverse fields.

Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN) which is the flagship magazine of the American Chemical Society and the chemical community is celebrating 90 years of its existence this year, and I can only imagine how perplexed and awestruck its editors from 1923 would have been had they witnessed the state of pure and applied chemistry in [...]

Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN) which is the flagship magazine of the American Chemical Society and the chemical community is celebrating 90 years of its existence this year, and I can only imagine how perplexed and awestruck its editors from 1923 would have been had they witnessed the state of pure and applied chemistry in [...]

In the September 6 issue of Scientific American, the magazine’s editors pen a piece explicitly supporting GMOs and opposing GMO labeling.

Throughout the world, the poor face increasingly gruelling choices; whether to save for retirement or to send a kid to college, whether to buy that used car for basic transportation needs or to buy educational material for their children.

It’s Ernest Rutherford’s birthday today. Along with Michael Faraday, Rutherford was the greatest experimentalist in modern history and the twentieth century’s experimental counterpart to Einstein.

There’s a good article in Slate which lays out a case for shuttling some of the funds spent on subsidies for renewable energy into R&D instead.

I want to point out this interesting analysis in Science of a counterintuitive trend noticed in the last few years, the fact that BMI is not a foolproof predictor of mortality and that being overweight can actually be better for you.

The warming, melting and potential contributions to sea level rise from glaciers in Greenland and West Antarctica in the face of climate change has long since been a serious concern.

Noted pharmacologist, Forbes blogger and North Carolina Museum of Natural History science communications director David Kroll has a good post in Forbes about the recent controversy regarding “Golden Rice”, a strain of rice genetically engineered to produce beta-carotene, the precursor of vitamin A.