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My laptop, a 2015 MacBook Pro that survived being drowned during the Chennai floods that year, went into the ICU today. A service person said the RAM was fried, along with some other adjacent components. When a friend asked if I was going to get a new machine, I said
Science
Scientists have combined one atom of sodium (Na) and one of caesium (Cs) to form one molecule of NaCs, achieving the most precisely controlled chemical reaction in history. They were able to achieve this using a fascinating bit of technology called a magneto-optical trap. While the trap itself has
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Today's post is just a very interesting tidbit I found when conducting research for a piece for #GRIT – about how, in the 19th century, the White House had a sewer gas problem so severe that Chester A. Arthur, the 21st US president, refused to move in there until
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Nagraj Gollapudi on the yo-yo fitness test, ESPN Cricinfo: A player starts at speed level 5, which consists of one shuttle. The next speed level, which is 9, also consists of one shuttle. Speed level 11, the next step up, has two shuttles, while level 12 has three and
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Here's another instance of an unsound university press release exaggerating the conclusions of a study. The headline goes "Children in India demonstrate religious tolerance, study finds". According to the 2011 Census, 182 million people in India are between the ages of 9 and 15. The two
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There's a formula in thermodynamics 101 called Carnot's theorem that goes like this: This is a famous equation because it defines the absolute upper limit of efficiency achievable by a heat engine, irrespective of how much its performance is optimised. ηth is the thermal efficiency; Tc
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I've had migraines since 2006, when I started college. The pain is excruciating, disabling, ruinous, usually on both sides of my head. I can sense a migraine coming 12-24 hours beforehand, in the form of a small sphere of ache embedded deep inside my brain that I
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There are many similarities between Kaala, Pa Ranjith's second flick with Rajinikanth, and their first film together, Kabali (2016). The thematic one is the most obvious, where Ranjith focuses on class mobility, caste discrimination and social welfare and brings them into mainstream cinema using Rajini as his frontman.
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I'm no artist, nor a scholar of art. I can't analyse images to pick out patterns. Heck, I think an image is well-crafted only because those commentators I trust have said it. My admiration of formal art is only by proxy, and will stay that
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I received an email from a fellow journalist last week with the following subject: Banks wont recover even half of the Rs 4,000,000,000,000 bad loans of 37 companies That number with all those zeroes is four trillion. It's a large number. For example, there
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It had to come to this at some point, and here we are finally. To undertake a challenge to write one blog post a day – when I've mentioned to my friends and colleagues that I'm doing this, all of their responses have presumed that this is
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There's a report in Science dated June 8 with the headline 'Middleweight black holes found at last'. The abstract describes an effort by an "international team" of astronomers to find intermediate-class black holes, which weigh more than tens of solar masses but less