Scicomm
Laser light has been used to cool atoms down to near absolute zero. The technique is simple, if versatile. (And includes some history involving a little-known Indian physicist.) Laser light is shined on an atom that's made to move towards the source of light. When the atom absorbs
Scicomm
There are two broad problems I've seen so far with writers/journalists quoting activists in science, health and environment stories as experts. (This post deals entirely with the Indian context.) First: Who has time for activism? The answer almost always is someone on the mainland, far away from
Scicomm
You are taught in school that protons and neutrons are particles. However, unless you get into physics research later in life, the likeliest way you are going to find out that they are technically quasiparticles is through the science media. So here it is. 😄 Setting aside their electric charge, protons
Scicomm
What is dust? It feels ridiculous just asking that question sitting in India. Dust is everywhere. On the roads, in your nose, in your lungs. You lock up your house, go on a month-long holiday and come back, and there’s a fine patina on the table. It’s inside
Op-eds
Bora Zivkovic, the former 'blogfather' of the Scientific American blogs network, said it best: journalists are temporary experts. Reporters have typically got a few days to write something up on which scientists have been working for years, if not decades. They flit from paper to paper, lab to
Scicomm
Has new ghost particle manifested at the Large Hadron Collider?, The Guardian, October 31: The prospect of such a mysterious particle has baffled physicists as much as it has excited them. At the moment, none of their favoured theories of reality include the particle, though many theorists are now hard
Op-eds
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently published a report exhorting countries committed to the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to an additional 1.5º by the end of this century. As if this isn't drastic enough, one study has also shown that if we're
Scicomm
I asked a friend earlier today if he would be interested in explaining the observation of Lyman-alpha lines in anti-hydrogen to an audience of high-schoolers.But will high-schoolers ever be able to understand what Lyman-alpha lines in anti-hydrogen are? In other words, when will 17-year-olds ever be expected to know
Scicomm
Read two interesting articles this morning: An editorial in the Indian Express about how India is the "land of the gullible", where even the "mere trappings of science suffice to tantalise" people into believing BS and coughing up fortunes for snake oil. An article in The
Scicomm
Daniel Mansur, the principal investigator of a lab at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina that studies how cells respond to viruses, had this to say about why preprints are useful in an interview to eLife: Let’s say the paper that we put in a preprint is competing with
Scicomm
Brian Keating, an astrophysicist who led the infamous cosmic inflation announcement in 2014, thinks this is how science works: “… you put out a result, and other scientists work to test the result”. However, his own story shows that this is a cute ideal that’s often unreasonable to expect on
Scicomm
Remember that paper about cognitive flexibility and nationalism? The one that said people who are more nationalistic in their politics tend to have lower cognitive flexibility? I’d blogged about it here. I hadn’t read the study’s paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,