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Watch the celebrations, on mute
Right now, Shubhanshu Shukla is on his way back to Earth from the International Space Station. Am I proud he’s been the first Indian up there? I don’t
5 min read
Sharks don't do math
From ’Sharks hunt via Lévy flights’, Physics World, June 11, 2010: They were menacing enough before, but how would you feel if you knew sharks were employing advanced mathematical concepts
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Enfeebling the Indian space programme
There's no denying that there currently prevails a public culture in India that equates criticism, even well-reasoned, with pooh-poohing. It's especially pronounced in certain geographies where
7 min read
Technical foundation for a muon collider laid at J-PARC
Featured image: All matter around us is made of elementary particles, the building blocks of matter. These particles occur in two basic types called quarks and leptons. Each group consists
7 min read
Technical foundation for a muon collider laid at J-PARC
A particle collider is a machine that energises two beams of subatomic particles and smashes them head on. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe is the world's
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Four years
Engineering as a methodology … contains a fundamentally materialist kernel, even if its present incarnation as a bourgeois science drives engineers to think and behave otherwise. — Nick Chavez, Engineers, Materialism, and
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India's next man in space
NASA/SpaceX/Axiom will make their next attempt to launch the Axiom-4 mission to the International Space Station on June 11. Axiom Space's tagline for the mission is
6 min read
On the BDS movements against Russia and Israel
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,
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Chasing solitons
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,
4 min read
Empathy for Donald Pettit
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's
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"Who are we?"
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
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Williams's success is… ours?
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
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Who funds quantum research?
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
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Subtracting from science funding
‘NavIC’s hurdles project govt’s reluctance to fund innovation’, Hindustan Times, February 7, 2025: India … chose a more cautious path. For decades, we’ve been telling ourselves that we’
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Does science have trouble seeing governments?
From ‘Energy megaproject in Chile threatens the world’s largest telescopes’, Science, January 10, 2025: The AES project would occupy several sites totaling 3000 hectares, and the plants making hydrogen