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After I published my rebuttal to the Nature anti-preprints article, a scientist in the US wrote to me saying he was on the journal's side and that he expects preprints to be done away with in the future. It was dispiriting to hear. But in the last five
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Ergodicity is the condition wherein a sample is representative of the whole vis-a-vis some statistical parameter. An ergodic system is one that visits all possible states of its existence as it evolves. Axiomatically, a non-ergodic system is one that does not. Stuart A. Kauffman, a scientist at the University of
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An article in KurzweilAI begins, Plants could soon provide our electricity. Why would anyone take this seriously? More than excitement, this line rouses a discerning reader to suspicion. It is bound to be centred on the word "soon", implying in the near-future, imminently. You're not sure
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In response to my Twitter thread against Tom Sheldon's anti-preprints article in Nature, I received more responses in support of Sheldon's view than I expected. So I wrote an extended takedown for my blog and, of course, The Wire, pasted below. In 1969, Franz J. Ingelfinger
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Anyone who writes about physics research must have a part of their headspace currently taken up by assessing a new and potentially groundbreaking claim out of the IISc: the discovery of superconductivity at ambient pressure and temperature in a silver nanostructure embedded in a matrix of gold. Although The Hindu
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I am thoroughly dispirited. I had wanted to write today about how it is fascinating that we have validated Einstein's theory of general relativity for the first time in an extreme environment: in the neighbourhood of a black hole. The test involved the detection of an effect called
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Tom Sheldon, a senior press manager at the Science Media Centre (SMC), London, had an interesting proposition – at least at first – published in Nature on July 24. The journal's Twitter handle had tweeted it thus: "Do you think publishing on preprint servers is good or bad for
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I went to the most terrifying place in the world today: the dental clinic. I'd woken up this morning with a sharp pain under my right lower jaw and, soon enough, I realised it was time to get rid of the wisdom tooth – a divorce I'd
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https://twitter.com/notrueindian/status/1021302944992407553 "Nature is Lovecraftian" … is it? The literature of H.P. Lovecraft in freaky, at odds with the more conventional, less morally degenerate canon of English literary fiction irrespective of the period from which the latter is selected. To say "nature is
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I watched Black Panther again today. Two things came to mind. First: When by the end of the film T'Challa and Wakanda realise that they can't keep their technology a secret anymore, it is – among many things – an act of taking charge of their nation'
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A wide swath of fundamental physics and chemistry is defined by the pursuit of the ground state. Since we began elucidating the structure of the atom in the 1910s, much of what we know about how particles, quasiparticles and molecules behave can be described by a desire among each of
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(I can speak only for myself here) I certainly seem to be needing a monthly reminder that to focus on pure science as a journalist is not in any way an abdication of one's responsibilities as a citizen of India. The more forceful the reminder – i.e. the