Prof. Physics & Biology | Biophysics, epidemiology, sci-comm, climate change | Cats | Music | He/Him | Ashoka U | Lancet Comm| My views, not my employers
Joined September 2018
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Starting a thread with the music I like, an eclectic mix of Indian classical, world music, jazz + others. Later additions will come below [@PMenonIFPRI]
Alison Brown Quartet's "Under the Five Wire" from Bluegrass Underground ... youtu.be/fUvLgx-3Rbc via @YouTube
Congratulations, @nehadixit123
Neha Dixit is the first recepient of this award instituted in memory of Sonya Gill, PARI Co-Founder and Trustee who left us in August 2026.
@nehadixit123
Gautam Menon retweeted
New on @dataforin: seen over the long term, India's pre-monsoon season shows the most substantive changes in the frequency and intensity of seasonal rainfall.
A thread on our analysis using 120 years of daily IMD rainfall data:
Congratulations, Samriddhi!
ICTS faculty member Samriddhi Sankar Ray was selected as a recipient of the Asian Fluid Mechanics Association (AFMA) Award 2026.
icts.res.in/news/samriddhi-s…
Gautam Menon retweeted
🧪⚛️ Two interactive demos and two physicist memorials, for a little science perusal at the end of October. nanoscale.blogspot.com/2026/…
It really is an exceptional museum.
I am not surprised that Bihar Museum has been ranked ninth globally and first in Asia in Worth a Journey’s World’s 100 Best Museums 2026 list. It’s truly magical.
I had the opportunity to visit recently and was completely bowled over by its beautiful spaces, remarkable sculptures and the thoughtful way in which Bihar’s rich history and culture have been brought alive.
Walking through the galleries, I felt how beautifully a museum can connect us to our past and make history engaging, accessible and deeply personal. India deserves many more world-class museums, places where our extraordinary heritage can spark curiosity, inspire pride and nurture a love of learning for generations to come. A wonderful achievement for Bihar. Do visit and experience its magic in person.
#BiharMuseum #Bihar #Museums
Gautam Menon retweeted
Appropriately lit by the flicker of flames and attended by the stench of sulphur....
Gautam Menon retweeted
"Little or no action is being taken by #Israel or Member States to stop the atrocities against the #Palestinian people," Srinivasan Muralidhar, chair of the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory & Israel, told the UN General Assembly's 3rd Committee. #UNGA81
Someday, in these parts.
📺 “We reported events one-sidedly for years”: Serbian TV apologizes to viewers after Vučić's party loses the election
Radio Television of Vojvodina (RTV) opened its news broadcast with footage of celebrations following the Student List's election victory — scenes it had failed to show the previous evening.
“For years, we failed to fulfill our duty. We kept silent, turned a blind eye, reported events one-sidedly, and failed to ask the necessary questions. For that, we owe our viewers an apology,” news anchor Goran Eror said.
Following the controversy, RTV's acting editor-in-chief Nenad Čačić resigned.
A similar incident occurred in Hungary, where state television also apologized to viewers after Viktor Orbán's election defeat.
Gautam Menon retweeted
How does the mitotic spindle adapt to genomes that differ in size by more than 10,000-fold? Our new paper in @NatureCellBio reveals a simple scaling law and the physics behind it: chromosome crowding! 🧵
nature.com/articles/s41556-0…
Gautam Menon retweeted
The Election Commission has filed its reply in the Supreme Court to the petition on how the three-member Commission functions.
27 pages, approved by all three members. Its argument: every decision was unanimous, and a Commissioner’s note is a “suggestion,” not a decision.
Here’s what it addresses, and what it doesn’t.
🧵 (1/10)
Gautam Menon retweeted
What happens when we treat rivers like canals, as merely a conduit for water? What happens is Himalayan dams and related disasters, river-linking schemes, toxic water... Parineeta Dandekar ( nitter.cf/parineeta_river -- follow her ) joins @AratiKumarRao and me on From The Marginlands to discuss what these projects promise, what they actually deliver, and who pays the price:
youtube.com/watch?v=is_1EnEy…
This is an important point. Even assuming force-fields are 'transferable' is something that needs to be justified.
I remember back when we thought that with infinite amount of compute and sampling we would predict protein-ligand binding with experimental accuracy for all known proteins and any arbitrary ligand.
What we found instead was that there are aspects of the physics and chemistry like buried waters, non-standard tautomers, crowding and weird weak interactions that we didn’t even know about.
I’m very optimistic about AI expanding the scope of what we can successfully model and predict, but you cannot simulate your way out of what’s simply unknown.
Gautam Menon retweeted
Watch this.
Lubna Speitan, author of the Greens4Palestine motion “Zionism is racism”, spells out the central obscenity of our age – the grotesque inversion whereby the victims of ethnic cleansing, Apartheid and genocide must constantly fend off accusations from their tormentors that it is they who are the racists.
“We as Palestinians are being silenced and gaslit and vilified [as we] witness the annihilation, the cold-blooded murder of our families, of our people… our children burnt with phosphorus, having to endure amputations with no anaesthetic, having their limbs torn and shredded, their bodies burnt by phosphorus, being starved to death … And to have to sit here … and try to bury my feelings so I can eloquently and diplomatically shield my anger, my rage, my anguish that every Palestinian is feeling, is an insult.” /1
Gautam Menon retweeted
On the contrary Ben, I spent several years travelling on foot around the region recording the testimonies of the minorities of the Middle East in this award-winning book. It records first hand testimonies from the Yezidis, the Copts, the Maronites, the Armenians, the Kurds and the Palestinian Christians as well as many Israelis and Jewish Egyptians. I've also made an entire Channel 4 documentary series on the Sufis of the region. That is exactly why, like your sister, I am so incensed by the mass murder currently underway in Gaza. Do dm me your address and I'd be happy to mail you a copy if you'd like to learn a little more on this subject.
The Jews are the only minority in that entire vast region that refuses to be eliminated from their minuscule, ancient homeland. That’s why they’re so loathed by the jihadists. Where are the Druzes, the Yazidis, the Copts and other Middle East Christians, the Berbers, the Sufis? Largely flattened, assimilated or driven out. You’re an expert on empires - but apparently Islamist imperialism in the Middle East isn’t a thing?
Gautam Menon retweeted
This article, by @stevenstrogatz for @TheAtlantic, is probably the most honest assesment of the current situation that you'll read. No one knows exactly how to move forward. What new training pathways will look like. How young mathematicians will develop the things the community have prized for generations like 'taste'. What they can say is that they are thinking very, very hard -- as if the future of the field depended on it. Because it does.
Gautam Menon retweeted
Fermi letter to Dirac.
Source: "From Florence to Fermions: a historical reconstruction of the origins of Fermi’s statistics one hundred years later", by Roberto Casalbuoni arxiv.org/pdf/2602.04484v1
Whither academic freedom?
At the German Middle East Studies Association, we express grave concern about the dismissal of our colleague Prof Michelle Pace by Roskilde University @roskildeuni for having taken a stance on the genocide against Palestinians and Danish Migration Policies. 1/3
