Uncategorized
Recently, an international team of researchers claimed that it had discovered particles called Majorana fermions in a topological superconductor. The international press went gaga but, unfortunately, there wasn't much discussion on whether what had been found was a particle or a quasiparticle. Many news outlets assumed that they
Uncategorized
(Note: There's some text beyond the postscript at the bottom.) A recent discussion with some of my peers alerted me to a need I've either been deaf to or just don't buy: readers, at least some of them, prefer to be presented with a
Uncategorized
You remember the criticism that former Indian men's ODI cricket captain M.S. Dhoni received when a member of the press, Sam Ferris, asked him a question about his retirement during a presser, got invited to the front by the sportsman and got snubbed in front of everyone?
Uncategorized
Four p.m. I was blinking out of my afternoon siesta and scrolling down my Twitter feed catching up on whatever I'd missed when an RT by Thony Christie caught me quite by surprise: "Mathematics genius Maryam Mirzakhani has passed away". It really jolted me out
Uncategorized
Gwyneth Paltrow's goop, a wellness brand that has recently come under fire for advertising almost-certainly pseudoscientific "lifestyle" products like $66 jade eggs for women to insert into their vaginas to strengthen their pelvic floors, put up three notes in their defence: two by doctors and
Uncategorized
https://twitter.com/JenLucPiquant/status/884814806666153986 https://twitter.com/techreview/status/884707338103521286 Last month, Chinese researchers announced that they had performed two amazing feats. First, they had performed an experiment recreating the spooky phenomenon called quantum entanglement. To borrow a clunky but sufficient explanation from the MIT Tech Review article
Uncategorized
Call me nitpicky or misguided but, as silly as this WhatsApp message sounds… … how many people stop to check how cabin pressure really works? Clearly the message is wrong but where does our impression that "it's wrong" come from? Does it come from the fact that
Uncategorized
Editions one, two, three, four, five, six and seven. A new study has used radar data obtained by the Cassini probe to determine that the winds blowing on Saturn's moon Titan aren't that strong. This is because waves on the surface of the three largest lakes
Uncategorized
CERN gets new Guinness World Records title, symmetry: The typical Guinness World Record has to be measurable and breakable. However, the organization also awards significant milestones for different subjects. The first proof of the existence of the Higgs boson, initially announced in 2012, made major news both within the particle
Uncategorized
I need to write what I'm going to to remind myself, and perhaps others, of a few things. In the last few weeks, it became important for me – as a member of the community of liberals in India – to give a fuck about the many lynchings throughout the
Uncategorized
Someone mentioned in passing that I should go for a run to break my writers' block (18 days and counting) – so I did, after a LONG time. I lasted barely thirty minutes and felt pain in parts of my body that I'd forgotten existed, but it was
Uncategorized
The more vicious public debates we have, the more it will seem like a 'conversation' cordoned off to those masses for whom an awareness of social and political issues is only just budding.