Restarting the LHC: A timeline
CERN has announced the restart schedule of its flagship science "project", the Large Hadron Collider, that will see the giant machine return online in early 2015. I'd written about the u…
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New results on Higgs bosons' decay into fermions
For a boson to be the Higgs boson, it has to be intimately related to the physical process it was hypothesized in 1964 to help understand. With new results published on June 22, physicists from CERN,…
Science Quiz - June 23, 2014
Every week, I create a science quiz for The Hindu newspaper's In School product. Although it is geared exclusively at school students, it should be available for adults as well because it's a…
Spitzer has helped choose a near-Earth object the A.R.M. could bring nearer
From its perch up in space, Spitzer can use its heat-sensitive infrared vision to spy asteroids and get better estimates of their sizes. This is what the author of a study that appeared in Astrophysi…
Studying our primal horizons at the Kuiper belt
In August this year, the New Horizons spacecraft will cross into the region of space beyond Neptune's orbit. It won't be the first human object to go this far: the two Voyager space probes hav…
R&D in China and India
"A great deal of the debate over globalization of knowledge economies has focused on China and India. One reason has been their rapid, sustained economic growth. The Chinese economy has averaged…
Better to have been a mammal in India
The Copernican April 10, 2014 Studies of fossils and soil samples collected at a site in South India have revealed unique attributes of the ecosystem not found in many parts of the world. In particul…
Elon Musk’s altruism powertrain is just good business
In 1907, the Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla sold all his patents to Westinghouse, Inc., for a heavily discounted $216,000, including one for alternating current. In 1943, he died penniless. In…
What life on Earth tells us about life 'elsewhere'
In 1950, the physicist Enrico Fermi asked a question not many could forget for a long time: "Where is everybody?" He was referring to the notion that, given the age and size of the universe,…
After-math of the IPL
Yes, we all know the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) won the Indian Premier League 2014, but who among all the teams' many players really did well? And were they awarded for it? The former is a decide…
As the ripples in space-time blow through dust...
The last time a big announcement in science was followed by an at least partly successful furor to invalidate it was when physicists at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory, Italy, claimed to have recor…
Gerald Guralnik (1936-2014)
Of the six scientists who came up with the idea of a Higgs boson in the mid-1960s, independently or in collaboration with others, I've met all of one. Tom Kibble was at the Institute of Mathematic…