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July 2024

Did we see the conspiracies coming?

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Tweets like this seem on point… … but I’ve started to wonder if we’re missing something in the course of expressing opinions about what we thought climate deniers would say and what they’re actually saying.… 

Games and life

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Running through the games on my phone and what I like about them

Agalloch

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Agalloch is a synonym of agarwood. In parallel, Aquilaria agallocha and Agalochum malaccense are synonyms of Aquilaria malaccensis, the accepted scientific name of a tree that produces much of the world’s stock of this wood.… 

A cynical archaeology

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From ‘ASI submits Bhojshala survey report to Madhya Pradesh High Court’, The Hindu, July 15, 2024: The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) on July 15 submitted its scientific survey report of the disputed Bhojshala-Kamal-Maula mosque… 

India-based neutrino oblivion

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In a conversation with science journalist Nandita Jayaraj, physicist and Nobel laureate Takaaki Kajita touched on the dismal anti-parallels between the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) and the Japanese Kamioka and Super-Kamiokande observatories. The INO’s story… 

‘Animals use physics’

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What came first: physics or the world? It’s obviously the world, whereas physics (as a branch of science) offered ways to acquire information about the world and organise it. To not understand something in this… 

The problem with a new, rapid way to recycle textiles

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Researchers from the University of Delaware have developed a chemical reaction that can break polyester in clothing down to a simpler compound that can be used to make more clothes. The reaction also spares cotton… 

Clocks on the cusp of a nuclear age

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You need three things to build a clock: an energy source, a resonator, and a counter. In an analog wrist watch, for example, a small battery is the energy source that sends a small electric… 

A view of the Shanghai skyline, January 31, 2019.

Buildings affect winds

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A 2022 trip to Dubai made me wonder how much research there was on the effects cities, especially those that are rapidly urbanising as well as are building taller, wider structures more closely packed together,… 

An example of simulated data as might be observed at a particle detector on the Large Hadron Collider. Here, following a collision of two protons, a Higgs boson is produced that decays into two jets of hadrons and two electrons. The lines represent the possible paths of particles produced by the proton-proton collision in the detector while the energy these particles deposit is shown in blue.

You’re allowed to be interested in particle physics

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This page appeared in The Hindu’s e-paper today. I wrote the lead article, about why scientists are so interested in an elementary particle called the top quark. Long story short: the top quark is the…