SCIENCE & DEVELOPMENT

Tipu Sultan and BJP’s War on History

WE now see a new Anglo-Mysore War being waged: the RSS has aligned with the British to deny Tipu Sultan his role in Indian history. Yediyurappa says Tipu was “not a freedom fighter”, a strange argument to give for dropping all reference to Tipu from history books. It must be difficult for a mind schooled – or more correctly lobotomised – in the RSS School of History to understand that the Anglo Mysore Wars were not wars for Indian independence, but a part of colonial wars that the British waged.

Google and IBM Fight on Quantum Supremacy

GOOGLE’S quantum supremacy claim has now been disputed by its close competitor IBM. Not because Google’s Sycamore quantum computer’s calculations are wrong, but because Google had underestimated what IBM’s Summit, the most powerful super computer in the world, could do. Meanwhile Google’s paper, which had accidentally been leaked by a NASA researcher has now been published in the prestigious science journal Nature.

India Receives First Rafale, Questions Unanswered

ON October 8, 2019, in Dassault’s plant in Merignac in the south of France, Raksha Mantri Rajnath Singh personally took delivery of the first of the 36 Rafale multi-role fighter aircraft India had acquired from France in 2015-16, the latter year being when the deal was signed. The handover was, of course, mostly symbolic since the first 4 Rafale fighters would arrive in India only in May 2020, while the first full squadron of 18 fighters would hopefully be available in India only in mid-2021 and the remaining 18 more than a year later in April 2022.

Quantum Computers Brings Uncertainty Knocking at Our Doors

NO, quantum computing did not come of age with Google’s Sycamore, a 54-qubit computer solving a problem in 200 seconds, which would take even a super computer 10,000 years. Instead, it is the first step in showing that there is a functional computation that can be done with a quantum computer, and it does indeed solve a special class of problems much faster than a conventional computer.

Rakhigarhi Skeleton DNA: Indus Valley People were not Rig-Vedic Aryans

TWO recent studies on ancient DNA and migrations into South Asia appeared at the same time in two of the most prestigious journals of their disciplines, one in Science, and one in Cell. Both share a number of common authors and have used Harvard’s genetics laboratory resources. Each of the papers are important in their own right. The Science paper reports ancient DNA from 523 samples from a number of sites in Iran, Central Asia and Anatolia, and comparing it to the current population in the region and in south Asia.

Chandrayaan-2 Slips between Cup and Lip

AFTER a long, text-book Chandrayaan-2 mission since launch on June 22, right up till a mere 2 km or so above the lunar surface, the much awaited soft landing of the Vikram Lander in the south polar region of the Moon on September 7, 2019 could not be achieved due to reasons that are yet to be determined. From what little is known at present, it appears that control of the Lander was lost at the very last stage of its descent, and it made a hard landing or, to put it in plain language, crashed, although how badly, is still not known.

Amazon Fires, White Nationalism and the Logic of Capital

THE Amazon fires with Brazil at its epicentre, have become worldwide news. Explaining the fires recently, Douglas Morton, chief of the Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said that August 2019 stands out as a month with a far higher number of fires than any preceding year since 2010. This is similar to what the Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) had reported earlier.

West Asia: Cheap Drones and the Shifting Strategic Balance

SAUDI Arabia, which started the Yemen war with its own coalition of the willing, is now facing the blow-back with Houthis launching a series of drone and missile attacks on infrastructure. Earlier Houthi missile attacks on Dubai and Abu Dhabi airports seems to have led to a rethink in the United Arab Emirates leadership on the dangers of military interventions abroad, leading to their partial disengagement from Yemen. The US also has now announced direct talks with the Houthis.

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