Lord of the Rings Day
A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you. This year I almost didn’t write this post because I don’t have anything to say about The Lord of the Rings itself. Chiefly, I have tired…
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…
I, Head-bumper
Tall. I’m tall for India, around 6’3”. My height has recently been on my mind. India is not a good place for tall people. The public infrastructure is geared towards shorter people — the average…
Spotting fakes by looking at them
On March 10, the Supreme Court said a balance has to be struck between warding against misinformation online and protecting citizens’ right to free speech. The context was the Centre’s attempts to defend the 2023…
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…
The pleasures of rewatching
I’m afraid the answer is F.R.I.E.N.D.S. My sister and I watched it growing up, then rewatched it, the re-rewatched it, and now then have it playing in the background as I work. I have some…
On mathematics and reputation
From ‘Formalizing the stability of the two Higgs doublet model potential into Lean: identifying an error in the literature’, uploaded to arXiv on March 9, 2026: Firstly, we believe this to be the first time…
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…
Review: ‘Decolonial Keywords’ (2026)
Everyone who knows me knows that my intellectual coordinates are defined by scientific ideas, even when they’re about sociology or the humanities. This is why I found a new book, Decolonial Keywords: South Asian Thoughts…
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…
Epstein or otherwise, Silicon Valley’s techno-elite know what they’re doing
The science writer Philip Ball has described “nerd tunnel vision” as the rationalisation scientists who maintained ties with Jeffrey Epstein after his 2008 conviction for soliciting underage sex offered, hinting at something more calculated than…
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…