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There's a report in Science dated June 8 with the headline 'Middleweight black holes found at last'. The abstract describes an effort by an "international team" of astronomers to find intermediate-class black holes, which weigh more than tens of solar masses but less than
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There were two developments in the news last week that were very important but at the same time didn't get mainstream attention: Microsoft acquiring GitHub and the LHC collaboration's measurement of the strength of the Higgs boson/top quark interaction. Before either of these developments could
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Until a few hours ago, I thought Harry S. Truman had been one of the worst-performing American presidents of all time. I was wrong. I'd spotted an infographic on Twitter, drawn up by FiveThirtyEight and talking about how Donald Trump might soon beat Truman in terms of having
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Whenever I think of world-building – as in the fantasy exercise where you build out the lay of the land, and then the land itself where you're going to situate your story – the first thing that comes to mind, of all things, is Ikea. Yes, the Swedish furniture brand.
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In the morning, I had managed to read a few pages of Karunanidhi: A Life in Politics, a new book by Sandhya Ravishankar about the DMK supremo, and noticed that even though it's a journalist's book, and even though Mukund Padmanabhan's verbose foreword points
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On average, people don't read as many books as they used to before because what we want to read has become available in more forms. We read articles on the web, tweets and posts on the social media, emails, WhatsApp notes and whatnot. This is why, while reading
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The National Council of Science and Technology Communication, under the Department of Science and Technology (DST), has floated a new initiative to promote science communication by researchers, particularly PhD students and postdoctoral fellows. It's being called the 'Augmenting Writing Skills for Articulating Research' (AWSAR). According to
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Puja Mehra wrote an excellent breakdown of the Narendra Modi government's economic performance of the last four years, the duration for which it has been in office. You should read it if you're interested in this sort of thing (and you should be). However, the article&
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I got myself a new phone today – the iPhone 6S. Before the purchase, I had spent hours on Amazon looking for the right phone within my budget, and quite possibly went through at least two score models. During this exercise, I noticed many phones on the market that had unabashedly
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I've got two things to say about my Elon Musk piece from yesterday. The piece was well-received, insofar as I was expecting it to be: there were a few bouquets, many brickbats. One troll called me "a Marxist in the garb of a science educator". I
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Jean-Paul Sartre famously refused a Nobel Prize for literature (in 1964) because, he said, he didn’t want to be “institutionalised”. His eagerness to prevent this transformation wasn’t misguided. Perhaps more famously, at least among science journalists, many Nobel laureates in the sciences have turned into institutions after winning
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After the IPL 2018 concluded last night, Star Sports TV has been doing reruns of the tournament, showing highlights from all the 60 matches as well as compilations of the performances by category. One of these categories is "longest sixes". Hitting a six is a combination of strength