Necessity of the interdisciplinary
A strange cosmic “crucifix” in 774 AD, recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, could be explained by the occurrence of a supernova, perhaps rendered unobservable by a dense cloud of gas between Earth and the dying…
June 2012
Understanding the Solar System from within a shard
A new variant of titanium oxide was discovered less than two days ago at Caltech, embedded within the famous Allende meteorite, which crashed on Earth in 1969. Using electron diffraction, mineralogists found the mineral, named…
What’s allowed and disallowed in the name of SUSY
The International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) is due to begin on July 7 in Melbourne. This is the 26th episode of the most prestigious scientific conference on particle physics. In keeping with its…
The post-reporter era
One of the foundation stones of journalism is the process of reporting. That there is a messenger working the gap between an event and a story provides for news to exist and exist with myriad…
Fizzed-out futures
Initiatives are arising to plug holes in the Indian education system, or so they claim. Many are ambitious, some even overreaching, but they also exist in the company of those that are honest. However, the…
A simplification of superfluidity
“Once people tell me what symmetry the system starts with and what symmetry it ends up with, and whether the broken symmetries can be interchanged, I can work out exactly how many bosons there are…
SciAm’s new blog on the block!
Scientific American has announced the introduction of a new blog, Critical Opalescence, edited by senior editor George Musser. It will focus on the quirky and the fascinating, attempting to revive interest in forgotten papers, explain usually…
The Sea
Big Fish walked into a wall. His large nose tried to penetrate the digital concrete first. Of course, it went in for a second, but Marcus recomputed the algorithm, and it jumped back out. The…
Universality of the Lotka-Volterra equations
If humankind were to discover a planet that harbours water, and if, by some provenance, the same unicellular organisms that were the precursors to Earth-bound evolution were to be introduced into this environment… Would the…
Winterwolf VII
At that moment, the semi-AI beeped completion, and 34 jumped out of the chair in one fluid motion and lunged at 32, pinning him to the floor as the gun spilled from his hand and…
Winterwolf VI
“Right. Caution. Good. Anyway, where was I? Yes! Evolution! This race of new humans was enabled to evolve at an accelerated pace, to mutate and reform within a decade without having to wait for a…
Winterwolf V
The alarms didn’t bother him; no one would believe an upgraded cyborg could have committed murder. On the other hand, the CEs 32 and 34 were the only cyborgs aboard the Winterwolf, and would quickly…