The molecule that was also a wave
According to the principles of quantum mechanics, you're a wave – just like light is both a particle and a wave. It's just that your wavelength is so small that your wave nature doesn't ma…
Scicomm
331 posts
A why of how we wear what we wear
There are many major industries operating around the world commonly perceived to be big drivers of climate change. Plastic, steel and concrete manufacturing come immediately to mind – but fashion does…
A windier world
A new paper in Nature Climate Change reports a reversal in "terrestrial stilling" since 2010 – i.e. global wind speeds, thought to be in decline thanks to deforestation and real estate devel…
The circumstances in which scientists are science journos
On September 6, 2019, two researchers from Israel uploaded a preprint to the bioRxiv preprint server entitled 'Can scientists fill the science journalism void? Online public engagement with two sc…
The imperfection of strontium titanate
When you squeeze some crystals, you distort their lattice of atoms just enough to separate a pair of charged particles and that in turn gives rise to a voltage. Such materials are called piezoelectric…
Starlink and astronomy
SpaceX's Starlink constellation is currently a network of 120+ satellites and which, in the next decade, will expand to 10,000+ to provide low-cost internet from space around the world. Astronomer…
The press office
A press-officer friend recently asked me for pointers on how he could help journalists cover the research institute he now works at better. My response follows: 1. Avoid the traditional press releas…
Indian scicomm's upside-down world
Imagine a big, poisonous tree composed of all the things you need to screw up to render a field, discipline or endeavour an elite club of just one demographic group. When it comes to making it more in…
A new map of Titan
It’s been a long time since I’ve obsessed over Titan, primarily because after the Cassini mission ended, the pace of updates about Titan died down, and because other moons of the Solar System (Europa,…
The trouble with laser-cooling anions
For scientists to use lasers to cool an atom, the atom needs to have two energy states. When laser light is shined on an atom moving towards the source of light, one of its electrons absorbs a photon,…
Disastrous hype
This is one of the worst press releases accompanying a study I've seen: The headline and the body appear to have nothing to do with the study itself, which explores the creative properties of an…
The climate and the A.I.
A few days ago, the New York Times and other major international publications sounded the alarm over a new study that claimed various coastal cities around the world would be underwater to different d…