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A postscript to the opinions v. reportage question, and why I'm not a fan of a label saying 'Opinion' atop oped pieces on a news website: Many consider the opposite of balance to be imbalance, and the opposite of being neutral to be biased – or vice
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Something leapt in my heart when I read Kangana Ranaut's latest repartee to Saif Ali Khan's misguided notes on nepotism and eugenics. There were many reasons for this but one in particular was to see the name 'Terence Tao' mentioned among the examples Ranaut
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Featured image: Four of the 66 antennae of the ALMA array. Credit: Carlos Padilla – AUI/NRAO. Editions one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight In edition #8 of 'why Titan is awesome', we visited a lake near Titan's north pole, named Ligeia Mare, and
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Recently, an international team of researchers claimed that it had discovered particles called Majorana fermions in a topological superconductor. The international press went gaga but, unfortunately, there wasn't much discussion on whether what had been found was a particle or a quasiparticle. Many news outlets assumed that they
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(Note: There's some text beyond the postscript at the bottom.) A recent discussion with some of my peers alerted me to a need I've either been deaf to or just don't buy: readers, at least some of them, prefer to be presented with a
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You remember the criticism that former Indian men's ODI cricket captain M.S. Dhoni received when a member of the press, Sam Ferris, asked him a question about his retirement during a presser, got invited to the front by the sportsman and got snubbed in front of everyone?
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Four p.m. I was blinking out of my afternoon siesta and scrolling down my Twitter feed catching up on whatever I'd missed when an RT by Thony Christie caught me quite by surprise: "Mathematics genius Maryam Mirzakhani has passed away". It really jolted me out
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Gwyneth Paltrow's goop, a wellness brand that has recently come under fire for advertising almost-certainly pseudoscientific "lifestyle" products like $66 jade eggs for women to insert into their vaginas to strengthen their pelvic floors, put up three notes in their defence: two by doctors and one
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https://twitter.com/JenLucPiquant/status/884814806666153986 https://twitter.com/techreview/status/884707338103521286 Last month, Chinese researchers announced that they had performed two amazing feats. First, they had performed an experiment recreating the spooky phenomenon called quantum entanglement. To borrow a clunky but sufficient explanation from the MIT Tech Review article
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Call me nitpicky or misguided but, as silly as this WhatsApp message sounds… … how many people stop to check how cabin pressure really works? Clearly the message is wrong but where does our impression that "it's wrong" come from? Does it come from the fact that
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Editions one, two, three, four, five, six and seven. A new study has used radar data obtained by the Cassini probe to determine that the winds blowing on Saturn's moon Titan aren't that strong. This is because waves on the surface of the three largest lakes
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CERN gets new Guinness World Records title, symmetry: The typical Guinness World Record has to be measurable and breakable. However, the organization also awards significant milestones for different subjects. The first proof of the existence of the Higgs boson, initially announced in 2012, made major news both within the particle