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There was an announcement from CERN on June 20 that I'd wanted to cover, missed it and which – to my zero surprise – no one else covered either. For the first time, two Asian schools have won CERN's annual Beamline for Schools competition. The winning students will
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It isn’t tempting to write about Elon Musk in that it is easy but in that it is an event that few thought we could witness live: a successful businessman letting his inner recklessness show. Yes, I’m accusing Musk of something as simple as lacking composure – but sadly
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I'm not fully convinced as to why everyone is currently bashing the Jio Institute up. When the 'Institutions of Eminence' scheme's rules were announced in August 2017 and greenfield institutions were welcomed to apply, everyone was either perfectly okay with the idea or didn&
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There's a video from Postcard News doing the rounds, showing a lady demonstrating the ability of a cow-urine-based substance to purportedly detoxify the human body. It does a fabulous job of making a mockery of itself given that it is only a few minutes long – and
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There was no post on July 11 because whatever I wrote on that day was for the article below. I couldn't share it on that day itself because the embargo for the scientific papers it was based on lifted at 8.30 pm on July 12. I. Prologue
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The most curious thing about moving to Delhi – little anxiety, lots of a seemingly deep-rooted melancholy that I will no longer have a scientist roommate. It was one of the most fun things about my time living in Chennai, and unexpectedly so. My roommate there was a physicist. He&
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The Higgs boson has finally been observed decaying into the particles it most often decays to – six years after it was discovered. The reason for this delay was noise. The Higgs boson is a scalar boson: it has spin 0. To preserve the value of this spin quantum number, it
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Fracture mechanics theory in college was never my forte, whether that was because it was taught by a particularly dull professor who thought he had a loud voice or because it was just a dry subject. Rule 1: If a crack forms in a solid material, it's because
Science
Physicists created a Bose-Einstein condensate of chromium atoms, ensured the atomic spins were each aligned 90º to the condensate's plane, applied a magnetic field gradient and separated the atoms by a small but relatively significant distance, fired radio pulses at the condensate to get the atoms'
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The News Minute, July 6, 2018: Terracotta handicrafts and vessels, bamboo trinkets, organic grains, herbs and pulses up for sale. Children running around playing with natural stick and wheel toys made using Palmyra palm leaves. An array of fresh and dried herbs displayed along with lemon and betel leaves on
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Good fantasy fiction – rather simply fantasy fiction – is defined not by a freewheeling re-imagination of reality but one that is re-imagined as much as contained in a self-consistent, coherent and substantive framework that is logical, cultural, political, aesthetic or a combination of some/all of them. With
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I've been in Delhi for three days, and for the last two of which I've been house-hunting and then buried in office work. While I was trawling through dozens of Facebook posts and items on Magicbricks and 99acres looking for advertisements of 1 or 2