The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has achieved another leap in its quest for self-reliance in space, successfully launching the heaviest communication satellite ever lifted from Indian soil using its formidable heavy-lift rocket, the Launch Vehicle Mark-3 (LVM3). Affectionately nicknamed ‘Bahubali’ for its sheer power, the LVM3-M5 mission placed the critical 4,410 kg CMS-03 spacecraft into a precise Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO) on Sunday, November 2, 2025, from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre.

University of Potsdam

Bengaluru

In an earlier episode of The Joy of Science Shambhavi Chidambaram spoke to Professor Shravan Vasishth about, among other things, the joy of psycholinguistics. In this interview, Professor Vasishth talks in detail about teaching statistics and the need to understand uncertainty both to students and the general public. He is the author of “Shravan Vasishth’s Slog”, a blog about statistics. This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness and has been run past Prof Vasishth for accuracy before publication.

Bengaluru

In this episode of The Joy of Science, Shambhavi Chidambaram speaks to Professor Shravan Vasishth, an Indian-origin professor of psycholinguistics at the University of Potsdam in Germany. In addition to his research, Prof Vasishth is an author of two interesting blogs—“Shravan Vasishth’s Slog”, where he talks about statistics, and “Things People Say”, a moving personal blog about his experiences of dealing with kidney failure and hemodialysis, and navigating the German health care system. 

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