One of the students in my wife’s religious studies course wrote: If the Hindu religion were compared to Science, the Upinshads would embody core scientific principles like skepticism, an attempt to prove theories wrong, a recognition of the unknown, and individual experimentation…while the Vedas would be the current body of work, or current theory....

Our latest paper on designing nano/microbots has earned a lot of publicity in the last few days , . What we reported in the paper was that one can attach polymerization catalysts to microspheres and these start to move around in the presence of the monomer as a result of polymer formation. Also, they are able to “sense” and move up a gradient of the...

I have started to hate the word, magic. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as follows: The use of means (as charms or spells) believed to have supernatural power over natural forces. While I love magic tricks, I can’t stand physical processes or operations of gizmos described as magic. To me, what it says is that we are too dumb to understand...

Wow! My last post elucidated a lot of comments! The comment by Richard Williams raises some interesting issues. The first is a lifestyle issue. As our twenty-something daughter puts it: I can’t imagine being stuck in a small college town where you mostly interact with people exactly like you; it sounds so limiting, which is exactly what this generation...

Our daughter wrote to me recently: “How do scientists studying the core subjects like chemistry, physics, biology, etc., feel about the rise of Silicon Valley, in terms of taking away possible talent? I think in the cold war era, there was coolness and urgency around the core sciences that attracted bright people, which has shifted away towards websites...

The post-election power shift in the U. S. has led to a lot of concerns about possible cuts in science funding. Kaushik Datta’s post nicely summarizes many of the concerns. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is offering a webinar with the title: “Election 2010: What do the U.S. mid-term elections mean for science?” Similar...