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Tracing the origins of Pu-244
Plutonium-244 could've come from neutron-star mergers, so knowing its abundance could reveal the rate at which such mergers happen.
VM
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The downward/laterward style in science writing
As a science writer, I don't like the inverted pyramid but prefer the pyramid: starting with a slowly building trickle of information at the top with the best stuff coming at the bottom.
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#ChennaiRains – let's not forget
It's very important to glorify the people who've stood up to adversity but when the adversity was brought on by the government, it's equally – if not more – important to call it out as well.
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Relativity’s kin, the Bose-Einstein condensate, is 90 now
The BEC was Einstein's last major prediction and it took a revolution in quantum optics to be realised.
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Why this ASTROSAT instrument could be a game-changer for high-energy astrophysics
Between them, NASA's Swift and NuSTAR telescopes have a blindspot that the CZTI instrument can efficiently bridge
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A new dawn for particle accelerators in the wake
A discussion of what updates in experimental particle physics are allowing accelerators to get smaller
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Is the universe as we know it stable?
The anthropic principle has been a cornerstone of fundamental physics, being used by some physicists to console themselves about why the universe is the way it is: tightly sandwiched between two dangerous states. If the laws and equations that define it had slipped during its formation just one way or
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An app for dissent in the 21st century
“Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.” These words belong to the French philosopher Albert Camus, from his essay The Rebel (1951). The persistence of that appeal is rooted in our ease of access to it – as the holders of
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Research funding in India
After Vidya Krishnan of The Hindu broke the news of the 'Dehradun Declaration', which imposed a startling funding restriction on the Centres for Scientific and Industrial Research, multiple perspectives on the issue came to light for me. One was about the tensions between funding curiosity-driven research and funding
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Vanilla entertainment
One of the first, and most important in hindsight, bits of advice I got from the journalist Siddharth Varadarajan was about how to choose what to write: "Write what you'd like to read" (Dan Fagin would later add the important "why now" dimension). As
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Cybersecurity, a horse with no name
Excerpt: Cybersecurity sounds like it could be that horse, in the form of IT infrastructure to effectively defend against the desert of cyber-weaponry, except we've probably only just seen a foal. When software is weaponised and used in cyber-attacks, we’re confronted with a threat we’ve not
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Geoff Marcy
About a week go, NASA announced the 20th anniversary of the discovery of the first exoplanet, and all I could do was think of the amazing Geoff Marcy. When it comes to exoplanet astronomy and the hunt for these objects, Marcy is THE guy (The Atlantic compared his contributions to