The problem begins simply enough. A journalist finds a word that seems to fit almost everything. It might be “crisis”, “pivot” or the ever-convenient “impact”. It’s concise, authoritative, and headline-friendly. It appears once, then again,…
A strange thing: a whale has washed up on a beach near Visakhapatnam. Not just any whale but a fully grown baleen, a hundred feet long and weighing about 40 tonnes (although I’m not clear…
Scientists have uncovered a remarkable self-healing property in a strange class of materials known as quasicrystals, revealing their ability to grow into a perfect, single structure even when faced with obstacles. The discovery challenges a…
Jane Goodall was a celebrated figure in conservation. Her work with chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania redefined primatology. However, more than a few publications as well as conservation experts writing on…
We often understand science primarily in terms of its tangible successes, looking to it for advances in medicine, for the foundations of technologies, and for the tools with which to predict and manage our environment.…
The American-Israeli economic historian Joel Mokyr has been awarded one half of the 2025 special Nobel Prize for economics “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress”. Now, by rewarding particular achievements…
When light, sound or any kind of wave travels through a complex medium like fog, murky water, or biological tissue, it scatters in many directions. Each particle or irregularity in the medium changes the path…
Congratulations, László Krasznahorkai, for winning the Nobel Prize for literature. I still remember reading his The Melancholy of Resistance (1989). It was a mostly unnerving, somewhat frightening experience because I read it at a time…
Bayes’s rule is one of the most fundamental principles in probability and statistics. It allows us to update our beliefs in the face of new evidence. In its simplest form, the rule tells us how…
The double-slit experiment has often been described as the most beautiful demonstration in physics. In one striking image, it shows the strange dual character of matter and light. When particles such as electrons or photons…