An Earth sciences ministry
On January 15, Harsh Vardhan, the Union science and technology minister, mulled renaming India's Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) as "Bharat Mata Mantralaya". (In Hindi, the ministry is…
Scicomm
331 posts
CERN's next collider looks a bit like China's
The world's largest particle physics laboratory has unveiled its design options for the Large Hadron Collider's successor – what is expected to be a 100-km long next generation 'supercolli…
Charge-ordering and Cooper pairs
There are many kinds of materials that become superconductors at low temperatures. One famous kind is the cuprates, compounds of copper and oxygen. Some cuprates have been known to become superconduct…
Why physical networks aren’t like their on-paper counterparts
At first glance, this tweets appears to state something obvious: https://twitter.com/nature/status/1071217062930980870 Of course the three-dimensional arrangement of links and nodes, and the space t…
Using light to cool sound
Laser light has been used to cool atoms down to near absolute zero. The technique is simple, if versatile. (And includes some history involving a little-known Indian physicist.) Laser light is shined…
The trouble with activism as expertise
There are two broad problems I've seen so far with writers/journalists quoting activists in science, health and environment stories as experts. (This post deals entirely with the Indian context.)…
Understanding the proton's mass – and then the universe's
You are taught in school that protons and neutrons are particles. However, unless you get into physics research later in life, the likeliest way you are going to find out that they are technically qua…
The story of dust
What is dust? It feels ridiculous just asking that question sitting in India. Dust is everywhere. On the roads, in your nose, in your lungs. You lock up your house, go on a month-long holiday and com…
Let the arrogators write
Bora Zivkovic, the former 'blogfather' of the Scientific American blogs network, said it best: journalists are temporary experts. Reporters have typically got a few days to write something up…
New anomaly at the LHC
Has new ghost particle manifested at the Large Hadron Collider?, The Guardian, October 31: The prospect of such a mysterious particle has baffled physicists as much as it has excited them. At the mom…
Climate fear
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently published a report exhorting countries committed to the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to an additional 1.5º by the end of this century.…
War and peace
I asked a friend earlier today if he would be interested in explaining the observation of Lyman-alpha lines in anti-hydrogen to an audience of high-schoolers.But will high-schoolers ever be able to un…