Scicomm

The history, culture and science of 'cardiac coherence breathing'

VM

01 Feb 2019 — 4 min read

A recent article in Scientific American on the benefits of “proper breathing” for overall health has ignited anger across social media, with many in India accusing the magazine of rebranding or even appropriating the ancient Indian breathing technique of ‘pranayama’.

Detailed description of the benefits of the 2500-year-old Indian technique of pranayama, dressed up in 21st c. scientific language as "cardiac coherence breathing"! It's taking the West a few millennia to learn what our ancients taught us millennia ago, but hey, you're welcome... https://t.co/LLltRZ3pP5
— Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) January 29, 2019

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