An explosive study
My cousin sister Swathi Murali has her first peer-reviewed paper out, expected in print in the December 2026 edition of Forensic Chemistry. Excerpt from the abstract: Electrical tapes may be submitted to forensic laboratories for…
Scicomm
Computation that computes
While I was recently browsing the web for interesting physics papers, I came across one in Nature titled ‘A thermodynamically favoured molecular computer’. The work itself seemed interesting but what caught my eye was a…
Why launch costs dropped but may not keep dropping
In a study published in PNAS Nexus on July 14, two researchers affiliated with institutes in France, Italy, and the UK analysed more than 4,400 launches in 16 geographical entities and with 330 rocket configurations…
A thought for emergence
The physicist Carlo Rovelli makes a strong case in this essay that consciousness is “of the same nature” as everything else in the universe, but in the course of doing that, he often writes as…
What Hannibal’s crossing cost
That thermodynamics has so very many applications is as fascinating as what it so often illuminates. Its tools and methods can be brought to bear on everything from celestial bodies and industrial machines to cellular…
Walk through chaos
I’m just going to invert that question a little and ask: Is a little order good for us? I’m doing this because the question “Is a little chaos good for us?” assumes that chaos can…
Gyroscopes
As silly as it sounds, as a student of mechanical engineering, I am partial to technologies that make use of mechanical forces. Today they are harder to come by because the solutions to the problems…
Orphan blocks on bitcoin network waste 16 GW
A new PNAS Nexus paper has shed light on a major source of hidden energy waste on the bitcoin network. Here, miners compete to solve a complex mathematical puzzle. The miner that solves a puzzle…
People, place, animal, disease
Is it a coincidence that more ‘complicated’ pathogens to vaccinate against and more poverty/poorer countries share a geographic area?
When is land more valuable — when it hosts a datacentre or a farm?
Excerpt from ‘Data center land use issues are fake’, by Andy Masley, May 2, 2026: Between 2000 and 2024, farmers sold in total a Colorado-sized chunk of land all on their own, 77 times all…
‘Hidden’ voting preferences
On May 4, former Tamil film actor C. Joseph Vijay and his Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) emerged in the Tamil Nadu Assembly elections as the single largest party. The magnitude of the victory was widely…
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…