What Gaganyaan tells us about chat AI, and vice versa
Talk of chat AI* is everywhere, as I’m sure you know. Everyone would like to know where these apps are headed and what their long-term effects are likely to be. But it seems that it’s…
December 2023
A survey of El Salvador’s bitcoin adoption
On December 22, a group of researchers from the US had a paper published in Science in which they reported the results of a survey of 1,800 households in El Salvador over its members’ adoption, or not, of…
Unexpected: Magnetic regions in metal blow past speed limit
You’re familiar with magnetism, but do you know what it looks like at the smallest scale? Take a block of iron, for example. It’s ferromagnetic, which means if you place it near a permanent magnet…
You can do worse than watching paint dry – ask physics
I live in Chennai, a city whose multifaceted identity includes its unrelenting humidity. Its summers are seldom hotter than those in Delhi but they are more unbearable because it leaves people sweaty, dehydrated, and irritated.…
A new path to explaining the absence of antimatter
Our universe was believed to have been created with equal quantities of matter and antimatter, only for antimatter to completely disappear over time. We know that matter and antimatter can annihilate each other but we…