Colliders of the future: LHeC and FCC-he
Because powerful accelerators take at least a decade to realise, physicists have started work on two machines to aid physics research of the future.
December 2015
Some thoughts on the nature of cyber-weapons
The agents of cyber-warfare are trapped as much as liberated by the ambiguities surrounding what the nature of a cyber-weapon is at all, with what intent and for what purpose it was crafted, allowing its…
Hopes for a new particle at the LHC offset by call for more data
The data pointing at signs of a new particle isn’t good enough to use yet.
Physicists could have to wait 66,000 yottayears to see an electron decay
An electron’s lifetime is predicted by prevalent theory that physicists would like to see disproved
New LHC data has more of the same but could something be in the offing?
Run 2 results from the LHC show that QCD is scale-invariant – in keeping with the Standard Model prediction.
Calling 2015
Overall, 2015 was a great year – breaking away from 2014 and nicely setting up 2016.
Tracing the origins of Pu-244
Plutonium-244 could’ve come from neutron-star mergers, so knowing its abundance could reveal the rate at which such mergers happen.
The downward/laterward style in science writing
As a science writer, I don’t like the inverted pyramid but prefer the pyramid: starting with a slowly building trickle of information at the top with the best stuff coming at the bottom.
#ChennaiRains – let’s not forget
It’s very important to glorify the people who’ve stood up to adversity but when the adversity was brought on by the government, it’s equally – if not more – important to call it out as…
Relativity’s kin, the Bose-Einstein condensate, is 90 now
The BEC was Einstein’s last major prediction and it took a revolution in quantum optics to be realised.