The evolution of doubt
On Twitter today, @thattai published a short thread about how framing the 'debate' about cellphone radiation harming biological tissue between ionising and non-ionising radiation is not a good…
VM
1664 posts
Asian winners of Beamline for Schools
1 min read
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…
The spectacle of Elon Musk coming undone
4 min read
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…
Jio and let jio
1 min read
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 in…
Right and reason
2 min read
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 makin…
Blazars and neutrinos
9 min read
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 li…
The Soufflé
1 min read
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 ti…
Problem of plenty
1 min read
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 bos…
Crack modelling
2 min read
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. R…
Collective spin modes in ultracold atoms
3 min read
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…
What it means to be green
3 min read
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 mad…
A fantastic helipad
3 min read
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 su…