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During a conversation with an emotionally intense and literarily prolific friend earlier this evening, the friend said many of the greatest poets had led doomed lives; doomed in the sense that they'd all suffered great misfortune - emotionally at least - and sorrow and loss. There were enough
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On July 4, 2012, when CERN announced that a particle that looked a lot like the Higgs boson had been spotted, the excitement was palpable. A multibillion-dollar search for an immensely tiny particle had paid off, and results were starting to come in. On March 6, 2013, when CERN announced
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This book review, as written by me, appeared in The Hindu Literary Review on April 6, 2013. -- Chernobyl is in the past. Well, it’s definitely easy to look at it that way when you think of what you've been told happened. On April 26, 1986, an
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One recommendation from this article on how to attract and retain more women in science is to implement an anonymous job-application process. It's evidently not an ideal solution - unlike other options on the list - as if it were uncomfortable to demand the effort necessary to sustain
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I'm not really sure how the internet works in space. I'm sure in whatsoever way it does, it's a pretty big deal because it signals the ubiquity of human technology in a place where few humans can and do exist. And there are a
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My blog got me my job. After all, it did make a cameo appearance during my interview, drawing an "Impressive!" from the Editor of the newspaper sitting opposite me. Ever since that episode in early June, I decided that I was justified in spending almost three hours on
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The Herschel Space Observatory, a.k.a. Herschel, was the largest space telescope at the time of its launch and still is. With a collecting area twice as large as the Hubble Space Telescope’s, and operating in the far-infrared part of the spectrum, Herschel could look through clouds of
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Nature India ran a feature on March 21 about three Indian astrophysicists who had contributed to the European Space Agency's Planck mission that studied the universe's CMBR, etc. I was wary even before I started to read it. Why? Because of that first farce in July,
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What if thousands of writers, economists, philosophers, scientists, teachers, industrialists and other many other people from other professions besides were able to pool their intellectual and creative resources to script one epic fantasy-fiction story? Such an idea would probably form the crux of an average to poor book idea, but
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A well-designed auditorium always has all its seats positioned on an inclined plane. Otherwise it wouldn't be well-designed, would it? Anyway, this arrangement solves an important problem: It lets people sit anywhere they want to irrespective of their heights. It won't matter if a taller person
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When the Chelyabinsk meteor – dubbed Chebarkul – entered Earth’s atmosphere at around 17 km/s, it started to heat up due to friction. After a point, cracks already present on the chunk of rock weighing 9,000-tonnes became licensed to widen and eventually split off Chebarkul into smaller parts. While
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The article, as written by me, appeared in The Hindu on March 7, 2013. -- Ever since CERN announced that it had spotted a Higgs boson-like particle on July 4, 2012, their flagship Large Hadron Collider (LHC), apart from similar colliders around the world, has continued running experiments to gather