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Category Archives: Scicomm
On the BBC, talking about Gaganyaan and inspiration
The BBC has produced a documentary podcast titled ‘Hope and fear: India’s space revolution’. Its host, Alok Jha of The Economist, interviewed me late last year as part of it, to provide a media perspective of the Indian space programme, … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Scicomm, Science
Tagged Alok Jha, Anil Menon, Axiom-4 mission, BBC, Dave Anderson, Hirschman's linkage theory, Homi Bhabha, human spaceflight, Indian Space Research Organisation, inspiration, Jahnavi Phalkey, Madhavan Nair, national prestige, Shubhanshu Shukla, spin-off technologies, unbalanced growth
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Climate change and the coastline paradox
A friend recently told me about a tool called climate.you that shows “temperature change, over land and sea”, at all points on the earth’s surface in a bid “to show how warming is already affecting people everywhere”. You can enter … Continue reading
The little things
Tungsten diboride (WB2) is extraordinarily stiff and resistant to deformation and scientists have long suspected it could be a superhard material, meaning it scores at least 40 gigapascal (GPa) on a hardness test. This is important because diamond, the hardest … Continue reading
Measuring science stories
Google News picks up on science stories that many outlets are covering. Its reasoning is that the more outlets publish a particular story, the more reader interest the story has. However, the flaw here is that news outlets don’t evaluate … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Scicomm
Tagged Google Discovery, Google News, newsroom analytics, reader interest, science journalism
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Would a quantum battery charge faster than a classical one?
A quantum battery is a system that stores energy and whose working parts are quantum systems, such as atoms, ions, spins, superconducting circuits or quantum dots, so the processes of storing and extracting energy are governed by quantum mechanics. Imagine … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged coherence, entanglement, ergotropy, parametric modulation, quantum advantage, quantum battery, qubits
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A laser worthy of a nuclear clock
The nucleus of the thorium-229 isotope has a special property: it has an excited state that’s incredibly close in energy to its ground state. The existence of such an isomer is remarkable because when nuclei normally get excited, they need … Continue reading
A bad Sprite ad
One of the advertisements during the ongoing T20 cricket World Cup on Star Sports India has been for Sprite, the carbonated beverage from the Coca-Cola Company. In the ad, it’s a hot day, two people are irritated by the heat … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Scicomm
Tagged carbonated beverages, Coca-Cola Company, electrolytes, FSSAI, heat stress, Sprite, sugar
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The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture
On Monday night, I kid you not, I dreamt of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. It was only by name, a fleeting mention in a heated conversation I was having with a friend. I’m not sure who spoke it or … Continue reading
From the Heisenberg cut to the Copenhagen interpretation
The following post was motivated by this exchange (on X.com), which prompted me to write out my understanding of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and the part the Heisenberg cut plays in it. I haven’t gone into the variants … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Scicomm, Science
Tagged classical mechanics, cloud chamber, Copenhagen interpretation, Erwin Schrodinger, Heisenberg cut, Jim Baggott, John Bell, John von Neumann, many-worlds interpretation, matrix mechanics, Niels Bohr, Quantum mechanics, quantum superposition, Schrödinger's cat, uncertainty principle, wave mechanics, wavefunction, wavefunction collapse, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli
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That humans quest for cosmic dawn
From ‘Cosmic dawn: the search for the primordial hydrogen signal’, Physics World, November 18, 2025: The EDGES instrument is a dipole antenna, which resembles a ping-pong table with a gap in the middle. It is mounted on a large metal … Continue reading