ON December 10, 2023, the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology was awarded in Stockholm, Sweden, to Dr Katalin Kariko and Dr Drew Weissman jointly “for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.” The citation said these “were critical for developing effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 during the pandemic that began in early 2020 and contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.” Presumably, this satisfied the condi

LAST month witnessed high drama at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. The company’s CEO and co-founder, Sam Altman was fired by the OpenAI Board, apparently at the behest of chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever. The move sent shockwaves across the tech world. OpenAI engineers wrote a letter to the board threatening to quit in protest. Microsoft, which had invested more than 10 billion dollars in the company, offered to hire Sam Altman, other key executives and engineers.

THE massive Starship super-heavy lift launch vehicle by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company took off last week on November 18, 2023 on its second test flight.  The launcher is the largest and most powerful ever built, weights 5,000 tonnes and can carry payloads of 100-150 tonnes. The launcher is a 2-stage vehicle comprising the booster and the spaceship atop, both stages being powered by SpaceX’s own Raptor engine, 33 of which power the booster.

SO here we are once again, regular like the seasons, with Delhi and the entire Indi-Gangetic plains right down to West Bengal shrouded in a grey haze of pollutants as visible in photographs from space.  13 of the world’s 20 worst polluted cities or towns in the world are in India, including Delhi, satellite towns and other urban centres in northern and eastern India. This has now become such a hardy and recurrent annual feature that it may as well be declared yet another festival of which we already have so many in this country.

ONE thing that has always been known about human space flight is that it is very dangerous. So far, 19 astronauts or cosmonauts (we will use the former term here for simplicity) have died in space accidents, which is a relatively high 3 per cent approximately compared to other forms of transportation. Significantly, only 3 of these fatal crewed space flights had flown above the Karman line, symbolically marking the edge of space at 100 km above the earth. Most fatalities have occurred during the launch phase or during re-entry, especially the former.