SCIENCE & DEVELOPMENT

China’s Large Passenger Jet Enters Commercial Service: Lessons in Self-Reliance for India

Enable GingerCannot connect to Ginger Check your internet connectionor reload the browserDisable in this text fieldRephraseRephrase current sentenceEdit in Ginger×IT has been some time coming, but China’s first large home-made passenger jet finally entered commercial service last week on May 28, 2023 on a China Eastern Airlines flight from Shanghai to Beijing. The C919 jetliner, with a 156-168 seat capacity and a nominal range of 4000-5500km, is made by State-owned Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China or COMAC.

Beyond the Brand: Biosimilars for Affordable Health Care

Enable GingerCannot connect to Ginger Check your internet connectionor reload the browserDisable in this text fieldRephraseRephrase current sentenceEdit in Ginger×SERENDIPITY and experimentation with what was available often showed us humans that plant products could help treat or prevent certain diseases. But the first modern drug was by Friedrich Sertürner in 1804, who extracted the main active chemical from opium in the laboratory and called it morphine.

Coronation of Charles III Reminds Us of Britain’s Bloody History of Genocide, Slavery, and Loot

Enable GingerCannot connect to Ginger Check your internet connectionor reload the browserDisable in this text fieldRephraseRephrase current sentenceEdit in Ginger×ON May 6th, Charles III was crowned king of the United Kingdom after the sun had decisively set over the British Empire. The ceremony reminded us again of the connection of the British Crown with the colonial loot and slave trade, the foundations of the British Empire.

Information Wants to be Free: Remembering Assange on Press Freedom Day

Enable GingerCannot connect to Ginger Check your internet connectionor reload the browserDisable in this text fieldRephraseRephrase current sentenceEdit in Ginger×MAY 3rd is World Press Freedom Day, a reminder that the role of news organisations is to speak truth to power. Not to manufacture consent – to use Chomsky’s famous words – for the government and the ruling classes. While doing that, I want to remember two men who exemplify the need to speak the truth: Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.

Dropping Evolution from School, Now Killing Vigyan Prasar

Enable GingerCannot connect to Ginger Check your internet connectionor reload the browserDisable in this text fieldRephraseRephrase current sentenceEdit in Ginger×IT was shocking and disturbing to learn from the press article titled “An Institution Dies” in The Statesman of April 24, 2023 that there is a proposal to close Vigyan Prasar, by August of this year. Vigyan Prasar (VP) was set up in 1989 with a mandate for science popularisation, communication and building scientific temper.

NCERT Textbook Revisions: Science is Target Too

Enable GingerCannot connect to Ginger Check your internet connectionor reload the browserDisable in this text fieldRephraseRephrase current sentenceEdit in Ginger×IN 2018, during the previous tenure of the BJP-led government, minister of state for the ministry of human resources development (now renamed education ministry) Satya Pal Singh told parliament, no less, that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was “scientifically wrong,” since humans have always existed on earth as humans, and since “nobody saw an ape turn into a man.” He also said school and college curricula should be

Freak Weather, Heat Waves and Coming Monsoons: Climate Change

Enable GingerCannot connect to Ginger Check your internet connectionor reload the browserDisable in this text fieldRephraseRephrase current sentenceEdit in Ginger×SUMMER has well and truly set in all over India. Monthly average temperatures in February have been the hottest since 1901. Temperatures were unusually high in western India in parts of Maharashtra and Konkan, and areas in Rajasthan recording as much as 7 C (degrees Celsius) higher than normal.

Fake History, Rockets and Tipu Sultan

Enable GingerCannot connect to Ginger Check your internet connectionor reload the browserDisable in this text fieldRephraseRephrase current sentenceEdit in Ginger×THE British saw the Mysore Kingdom of Tipu Sultan and Hyder Ali as a significant obstacle to the British Empire in India. The British lost the first three Anglo-Mysore wars before defeating Tipu in the fourth war. The British allies were the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Peshwas. Cutting to the present, the BJP's battle against Tipu is limited: it is about the Karnataka elections.

AI Models: Stochastic Parrots doing Tamasha?

THE unprecedented popularity of ChatGPT has turbocharged the AI hype machine. We are being bombarded daily by news articles announcing humankind’s greatest invention –  Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is “qualitatively different”, “transformational”, “revolutionary”, “will change everything” – they say. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced a major upgrade of the technology behind ChatGPT called GPT4. Already, Microsoft researchers are claiming that GPT4 shows “sparks of Artificial General Intelligence” or human-like intelligence – the Holy grail of AI research.

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