Science

Finding, and losing, Majorana

VM

23 Jun 2023 — 2 min read

I'm looking forward to breaking down and understanding a new paper in Physical Review B soon – the sort of work of condensed-matter physics that's complex enough to warrant a week-long dive into the subject but not so complex as to leave a non-expert enthusiast (such as myself) eventually stranded in a swamp of mathematical intricacies. But while I'm going to do that, I thought I should also make a note of how differently the paper's principal interestingness has been presented by its publisher and by its authors. The American Physical Society, which publishes Physical Review B, tweeted this on June 21:

set of trial spectacle lenses in medical clinic

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

3D rendering of a superconducting quantum chip laid out as a 16-qubit lattice. Twelve qubits in the middle are shown as small

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

Read more

Review: ‘Decolonial Keywords’ (2026)

Would a quantum battery charge faster than a classical one?

Epstein or otherwise, Silicon Valley’s techno-elite know what they’re doing

A laser worthy of a nuclear clock