Sympathy for Rapido?

If the government has taken its hand off the wheel, it needn't be a bad thing that Rapido is helping auto drivers opt for more rational fares instead

On the BDS movements against Russia and Israel

If a state isn't swayed by public opinion and threatens violence against dissidents, is it worth reconsidering what sanctioning non-combatants can be expected to achieve?

Harken to the fish

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 of Gauhati

The Berry phase of Kancha Gachibowli

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. You’re at

Chasing solitons

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

Empathy for Donald Pettit

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 mission. Researchers

Right to safe work

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

"Who are we?"

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

Happy Lord of the Rings Day

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

Williams's success is… ours?

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

Who funds quantum research?

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

On the US FAA's response to Falcon 9 debris

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

Donald Trump

The idea of doing right by the US

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,

National Science Day

Majorana 1, science journalism, and other things

While I have many issues with how the Nobel Prizes are put together as an institution, the scientific achievements they have revealed have been some of the funnest concepts I’ve discovered in science, including the clever ways in which scientists revealed them. If I had to rank them on

Barry Wilmore

Let’s allow space missions to be wonderful

Finally some external validation. After months of insisting Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore aren’t “stuck” or “stranded” in the International Space Station, after Boeing Starliner’s first crewed flight test went awry, the two astronauts have themselves repudiated the use of such words to describe their mission profile so

Brinda Karat

Do the poor want to be poor?

‘Justice Gavai’s comments on freebies overlook people’s struggle for survival: Brinda Karat’, The Hindu, February 14, 2025: CPI(M) Polit Bureau member Brinda Karat said the recent remarks on freebies by Supreme Court Judge Justice B.R. Gavai fails to recognise the struggle of India’s labouring class

defence spending

Subtracting from science funding

NavIC’s hurdles project govt’s reluctance to fund innovation’, Hindustan Times, February 7, 2025: India … chose a more cautious path. For decades, we’ve been telling ourselves that we’ll invest in science “when we’re economically better off.” It’s both prudent and a paradox. How do you

artificial intelligence

Learning with ChatGPT

I have access to the premium version of ChatGPT, and every day I ask it a few questions about concepts in physics that I’d like to know more about. Yesterday, for example, I learnt the difference between quenching and annealing… Is there an opposite phenomenon for quenching? Yes! The

climate change

Onward and spillward

‘The Lunacy Of Rebuilding In Disaster-Prone Areas’, Noema, April 25, 2024: In the months after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans proposed a flood control program unlike any other in U.S. history. Developed by the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, a diverse group of stakeholders appointed by the mayor, the resulting

Republic Day

An ambigram in The Hindu

The Hindu has an unusual ad in today’s paper (at least in the Chennai edition, which I get) on the occasion of Republic Day. At the middle is an ambigram that reads “journalism” one way and “democracy” upside down. Below the way that reads “journalism”, there’s a statement

phase transition

Neural network supercharges model’s ability to predict phase transitions

Place a pot of water on the stove and light the fire. Once the temperature in the pot reaches 100º C or so, the water will boil to vapour. This is an example of a phase transition that occurs every day in our houses. Yet scientists have difficulty predicting whether

Neil Gaiman

On Gaiman and a logic of compassion

That Vulture piece. If you haven’t already, read it but be warned: it’s just as disturbing as everyone is saying it is. One paragraph in particular I found more unsettling than the rest — not because it presents one more awful detail but because I just didn’t know,

blogging

Posting stats — 2024

When I joined The Wire in 2015, the average length of my blog posts increased from around 700 words to around 850 words, and over time to 1,000 words. This wasn't forced so much as a natural reflection of the average length of pieces that worked on

science journalism

New science pages in The Hindu

The Hindu has a new print product out called ‘Surf & Dive’ (S&D), whose first edition the editor Suresh Nambath and MP Shashi Tharoor launched at the group’s ‘Lit for Life’ event in Chennai on January 18. We’ve been working on this for quite some time