Analysis
Russia began its full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. On March 8, a poll conducted by independent survey organisations in Russia among a randomly selected cohort of 1,640 people reported around 46% supported the war, 13% supported it somewhat, 23% opposed it, and the rest were undecided
Op-eds
From 'Meghalaya’s new cave-dwelling fish adapts to streams overground', The Hindu, May 25, 2025: An underground cave in Meghalaya, in focus for a conflict over a Shivalinga-like stone formation, has yielded a new-to-science fish that adapts to streams overground. A team of zoologists, led by Kangkan Sarma
Op-eds
There's a concept in quantum mechanics, and also in parts of classical mechanics, called the Berry phase. Say you're walking around a mountain. You start off along a path and follow it all the way until you're back to the point where you started.
Scicomm
Every once in a while, I dive into a topic in science for no reason other than that I find it interesting. This is how I learnt about Titan, laser-cooling, and random walks. This post is about the fourth topic in this series: solitons. A soliton is a stable wave
Analysis
There was an intriguing outpouring of concern worldwide when Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore returned to Earth after 280-something days in space. People were particularly concerned about Williams's health and how she was doing, as if Wilmore hadn't been there with her living through the same
Analysis
The maximum daytime temperatures in the Kalaburagi and Belagavi districts of Karnataka this week are expected to be 41º C and in the late 30sº C, respectively. Research has found that if the relative humidity is high enough to render a wet-bulb temperature exceeding 30º C, outdoor exposure of even
Analysis
From '‘The physics community has never split like this’: row erupts over plans for new Large Hadron Collider', The Guardian, March 29, 2025: However, if the FCC were given the go-ahead, it could lock up funds for decades and end up dictating the direction that particle physics will
Culture
I recently started reading a book entitled The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay. It is historical fiction, immaculately detailed, with three excellent protagonists surrounded by a band of almost as admirable allies navigating a middle-era Spain in which three powerful politico-religious factions are vying for greater power. The
Op-eds
A day before NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore were to return onboard a SpaceX crew capsule, Prime Minister Narendra Modi published a letter in which he said he had inquired after her when he met U.S. President Donald Trump and that even if “you are thousands of
Analysis
An odd little detail in a Physics World piece on Microsoft’s claim to have made a working topological qubit: Regardless of the debate about the results and how they have been announced, researchers are supportive of the efforts at Microsoft to produce a topological quantum computer. “As a scientist
Analysis
On February 1, SpaceX launched its Starlink 11-4 mission onboard a Falcon 9 rocket. The rocket's reusable first stage returned safely to the ground and the second stage remained in orbit after deploying the Starlink satellites. It was to deorbit later in a controlled procedure and land somewhere
Analysis
After US troops withdrew from Afghanistan after two decades in 2021, the Taliban returned to power. In its oppressive regime many groups of people, but especially women, girls, and minorities, have lost most of their civil rights. In this time, Afghanistan has also suffered devastating floods and an ongoing famine,