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1664 posts

Powerful microscopy technique brings proteins into focus

5 min read
Scicomm ACE2 covalent bonds cryo-electron microscopy cryo-EM direct electron detector elastic scattering Falcon 4 field emission gun GABA inelastic scattering Joachim Frank kinetic energy mouse apoferritin Nobel Prize for Chemistry novel coronavirus sampling frequency signal-to-noise ratio structural biology Thermo Fisher Scientific X-ray crystallography

Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) as a technology has become more important because the field that it revolutionised – structural biology – has become more important. The international scientific com…

A future obscured by exponential growth

6 min read
Science COVID-19 epidemic COVID-19 pandemic exponential growth Factorio Homo sapiens logistics MachinePix predicting the future quality control rotary screen printer supply chain management technology wheat and chessboard problem

A couple months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I think most of us realised how hard it is to comprehend the phenomenon of exponential growth. Mathematically, it's trivial – a geometric progression –…

The climate change of bad news

6 min read
Analysis Op-eds bad news Ben Smith caste cognitive dissonance fact-checking Jacob Silverman Jonah Lehrer journalism Miami Herald parachute journalism privileges Rafia Zakaria Rukmini Callimachi The Atlantic The New York Times The New Yorker

This post flows a bit like the 1987 film Full Metal Jacket. As one friend put it, “It starts somewhere and then goes in a different direction.” This year hasn’t been beset by the same old steady driz…

Christopher Nolan's explosion

3 min read
Analysis Culture Scicomm AMD AMD FirePro carbon credits carbon emissions CGI Christopher Nolan climate change Furmark benchmark fx GPU graphics processing units Interstellar negative externalities Nvidia Nvidia Quadro One Health special effects Tenet

In May, Total Film reported that the production team of Tenet, led by director Christopher Nolan, found that using a second-hand Boeing 747 was better than recreating a scene involving an exploding pl…

A sanitised fuel

3 min read
Analysis Op-eds Science carbon dioxide DD News Department of Science and Technology draft EIA 2020 draft environmental impact assessment notification 2020 ecological security fossil fiels fugitive emissions Godavari river greenhouse warming potential hydrocarbons Krishna river Krishna-Godavari basin methane methanol ONGC

I debated myself for ten minutes as to whether I should criticise an article that appeared on the DD News website on this blog. The article is flawed in the way many science articles on the internet a…