Why Titan is awesome #8
Editions one, two, three, four, five, six and seven. A new study has used radar data obtained by the Cassini probe to determine that the winds blowing on Saturn's moon Titan aren't that stron…
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About benchmarking with records
CERN gets new Guinness World Records title, symmetry: The typical Guinness World Record has to be measurable and breakable. However, the organization also awards significant milestones for different…
What it means to give fucks
I need to write what I'm going to to remind myself, and perhaps others, of a few things. In the last few weeks, it became important for me – as a member of the community of liberals in India – to…
Intellectual humility
Someone mentioned in passing that I should go for a run to break my writers' block (18 days and counting) – so I did, after a LONG time. I lasted barely thirty minutes and felt pain in parts of my…
To understand #NotInMyName
The more vicious public debates we have, the more it will seem like a 'conversation' cordoned off to those masses for whom an awareness of social and political issues is only just budding.…
Communication, journalism and bullshit
Science can often be complicated to deal with and benefit from a journalist's gaze – but it must be accompanied, if not preceded, by science communication.…
Why Wonder Woman's breastplate isn't disappointing
The armour is not actually accompanied by the male gaze in the film, and may not even have been meant as armour at all.…
Unscientific breastplates
Wonder Woman's armour isn't entirely about 'her choices': it creates new ways to harm her because it's trying to preserve other things.…
Geometry's near-miss that wasn't
The extent of Euclidean geometry's imperfections only really came to light when physicists used Riemann's geometry to set up the theories of relativity.…
Weyl semimetals make way for super optics
A Weyl semimetal is a crystal whose lattice has the uncommon ability to carry electrical energy at room temperature.…
Amorphous topological insulators
Physicists from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, have found that topological insulators needn't always be crystals – as has been thought.…
GM: confronting contradictions
Neither the persuasion to nitpick scientific studies nor our persistent hypocrisy is going to end the GM crops debate.…