Frugality is a toxic chalice
From ‘Earth Imaging Satellite NISAR Exposes NASA’s Weaknesses, ISRO’s Strengths’, NDTV, July 26, 2025: At the end of the day, the US scientists have swallowed their pride and are sheepishly going to watch the launch…
July 2025
Physicists test if they can load antimatter on a truck
Physicists in Europe have reported that it’s possible to transport charged particles on a truck for four hours without disturbing them in any way. This seemingly run-of-the-mill announcement, reported in Nature on May 14, actually…
Quasiparticles do the twist
Physics often involves hidden surprises in how matter behaves at the smallest scales. A fundamental property in physics is angular momentum, which describes how things spin or rotate, from planets all the way down to…
Sniffing out the mystery chemistry of superheavy atoms
Remember the periodic table from your high school classroom? The table orders elements by how the valence electrons in their atoms are arranged. However, quantum physics calculations predict that in elements with atomic number greater…
A laser to make light of many shapes
Lasers can produce a slender beam of light of just one wavelength. For this simple feature, they are everywhere in modern technology, from the internet to medical devices and even in entertainment as holograms. However,…
Found: clue to crack the antimatter mystery
Imagine you’ve put together a torchlight. You know exactly how each part of the device works. You know exactly how they’re all connected togetger. Yet when you put in fresh batteries and turn it on,…
Watch the celebrations, on mute
Right now, Shubhanshu Shukla is on his way back to Earth from the International Space Station. Am I proud he’s been the first Indian up there? I don’t know. It’s not clear. The whole thing…
A blog questions challenge
I hadn’t checked my notifications on X.com in a while. When I did yesterday, I found Pradx had tagged me in a blog post called “a challenge of blog questions” in March. The point is…
Sharks don’t do math
From ’Sharks hunt via Lévy flights’, Physics World, June 11, 2010: They were menacing enough before, but how would you feel if you knew sharks were employing advanced mathematical concepts in their hunt for the…
The hidden heatwave
A heatwave is like the COVID-19 virus. During the pandemic, the virus infected and killed many people. When vaccines became available, the mortality rate dropped even though the virus continued to spread. But vaccines weren’t…
Quantum clock breaks entropy barrier
In physics, the second law of thermodynamics says that a closed system tends to become more disordered over time. This disorder is captured in an entity called entropy. Many devices, especially clocks, are affected by…
A new beast: antiferromagnetic quasicrystals
Scientists have made a new material that is both a quasicrystal and antiferromagnetic — a combination never seen before. Quasicrystals are a special kind of solid. Unlike normal crystals, whose atoms are arranged in repeating…