A tale of two horrors: poop and aliens
I saw this tweet yesterday:
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Review: ‘Decolonial Keywords’ (2026)
Everyone who knows me knows that my intellectual coordinates are defined by scientific ideas, even when they’re about sociology or the humanities. This is why I found a new book, Decolonial Keywords: South Asian Thoughts and Attitudes, edited by anthropologists Renny Thomas and Sasanka Perera, so compelling. The book
Would a quantum battery charge faster than a classical one?
A quantum battery is a system that stores energy and whose working parts are quantum systems, such as atoms, ions, spins, superconducting circuits or quantum dots, so the processes of storing and extracting energy are governed by quantum mechanics. Imagine you have a row of toy boxes. Each box can
Epstein or otherwise, Silicon Valley’s techno-elite know what they’re doing
The science writer Philip Ball has described “nerd tunnel vision” as the rationalisation scientists who maintained ties with Jeffrey Epstein after his 2008 conviction for soliciting underage sex offered, hinting at something more calculated than just oversight. “Nerd tunnel vision is a defining feature of much of the Edge discourse,
A laser worthy of a nuclear clock
The nucleus of the thorium-229 isotope has a special property: it has an excited state that's incredibly close in energy to its ground state. The existence of such an isomer is remarkable because when nuclei normally get excited, they need enormous amounts of energy — hundreds of thousands or