On September 5, 1977, NASA launched the Voyager 1 space probe to study the Jovian planets Jupiter and Saturn, and their moons, and the interstellar medium, the gigantic chasm between various star-systems in the universe. It’s been…
This is the coolest thing I’ve seen all day, and I’m pretty sure it’ll be the coolest thing you’d have seen all day, too: The Chain of Self-siphoning Beads, a.k.a. Physics Brainmelt. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6ukMId5fIi0] It’s so…
Four-and-half years of engineering, one year of blogging and one year of J-school later, I’m a sub-editor with an Indian national daily and not doing bad at all, if you asked me. I’m not particularly…
This is pretty cool. Twitter user @jamiebgall tweeted this picture he’d made of the Periodic Table, showing each element alongside the nationality of its discoverer. It’s so simple, yet it says a lot about different…
Lithium ion batteries have found increasing usage in recent times, finding use in everything from portable electronics to heavy transportation. While they have their own set of problems, they’re not unsolvable. And when they are solved,…
Science has been rarely counter-intuitive to our understanding of reality, and its elegant rationalism at every step of the way has been reassuring. This is why Bell’s theorem has been one of the strangest concepts…
The reason there are these movies that are adapted from books and don’t do well at the box office is that there are many people who haven’t read those books. Even though it’s reasonable that…
Quantum mechanics can sometimes be very hard to understand, so much so that even thinking about it becomes difficult. This could be because its foundations lay in the action-centric depiction of reality that slowly rejected…
In a previous post, I’d laid out the technical details of what goes into mining and transacting with bitcoins (BTC). My original idea was to talk about why they are an important invention, but also felt…