It seems clear now that the Academies responsible for the botched report on GM crops (my previous posts: [1, 2]) have no intention of making significant changes to the report, let alone retracting it. To recapitulate, the country’s top six academies of science, engineering and medicine prepared a report giving their opinion of GM crops, [...]

Mohamed el Naschie, Egyptian mathematician, has been much discussed recently for his single-handed effort in taking a journal that he edits, “Chaos, Solitons and Fractals”, to the “top” of its field (according to the most widely-misused metric, the “impact factors” published by Thomson Scientific): it had an “impact factor” of well above 3 (that is, [...]

Today’s Telegraph has a front-page article by T V Jayan on the Indian Academy of Sciences barring one of its fellows, Gopal Kundu, for three years for scientific misconduct.

Veronica Rodrigues, senior professor at NCBS, Bangalore, passed away yesterday. An obituary by her colleague (and NCBS’s director), K VijayRaghavan, is here. It describes her remarkable career and personality perfectly. She will be missed. I first met Veronica at a seminar in 2004, when I had just returned to India and only recently moved into [...]

Arundhati Roy is in the news again, thanks to the right-wing reaction to her (not new) statement that Kashmir is not an integral part of India. My colleague Rahul Basu savages her style while still criticising the threat of using sedition laws against her. Some days earlier, Harini praised Ms Roy for uniting the left [...]