Sympathy for Rapido
From ‘Rapido draws flak for charging users extra for traffic delays, commuters term it ‘extortion’’, The Hindu, June 3, 2025: Ride-hailing platform Rapido is under fresh scrutiny from [Bengaluru] use…
Get to the bottom of it
From ‘Rapido draws flak for charging users extra for traffic delays, commuters term it ‘extortion’’, The Hindu, June 3, 2025: Ride-hailing platform Rapido is under fresh scrutiny from [Bengaluru] use…
Russia began its full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. On March 8, a poll conducted by independent survey organisations in Russia among a randomly selected cohort of 1,640 people reported a…
From 'Meghalaya’s new cave-dwelling fish adapts to streams overground', The Hindu, May 25, 2025: An underground cave in Meghalaya, in focus for a conflict over a Shivalinga-like stone formati…
There's a concept in quantum mechanics, and also in parts of classical mechanics, called the Berry phase. Say you're walking around a mountain. You start off along a path and follow it all the…
Every once in a while, I dive into a topic in science for no reason other than that I find it interesting. This is how I learnt about Titan, laser-cooling, and random walks. This post is about the fou…
There was an intriguing outpouring of concern worldwide when Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore returned to Earth after 280-something days in space. People were particularly concerned about Williams…
The maximum daytime temperatures in the Kalaburagi and Belagavi districts of Karnataka this week are expected to be 41º C and in the late 30sº C, respectively. Research has found that if the relative…
From '‘The physics community has never split like this’: row erupts over plans for new Large Hadron Collider', The Guardian, March 29, 2025: However, if the FCC were given the go-ahead, it co…
I recently started reading a book entitled The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay. It is historical fiction, immaculately detailed, with three excellent protagonists surrounded by a band of almost…
A day before NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore were to return onboard a SpaceX crew capsule, Prime Minister Narendra Modi published a letter in which he said he had inquired after her…
An odd little detail in a Physics World piece on Microsoft’s claim to have made a working topological qubit: Regardless of the debate about the results and how they have been announced, researchers a…
On February 1, SpaceX launched its Starlink 11-4 mission onboard a Falcon 9 rocket. The rocket's reusable first stage returned safely to the ground and the second stage remained in orbit after dep…