Scicomm
A friend recently told me about a tool called climate.you that shows "temperature change, over land and sea", at all points on the earth's surface in a bid "to show how warming is already affecting people everywhere". You can enter the name of
Life notes
Daily writing promptWhat is one word that describes you? View all responses Tall. I'm tall for India, around 6'3''. My height has recently been on my mind. India is not a good place for tall people. The public infrastructure is geared towards shorter people
Analysis
On March 10, the Supreme Court said a balance has to be struck between warding against misinformation online and protecting citizens’ right to free speech. The context was the Centre’s attempts to defend the 2023 IT Rules: when the comedian Kunal Kamra asked who would decide if online content
Culture
Tungsten diboride (WB2) is extraordinarily stiff and resistant to deformation and scientists have long suspected it could be a superhard material, meaning it scores at least 40 gigapascal (GPa) on a hardness test. This is important because diamond, the hardest natural material on Earth, scores 70-100 GPa but because it
Culture
Daily writing promptWhat movies or TV series have you watched more than 5 times? View all responses I'm afraid the answer is F.R.I.E.N.D.S. My sister and I watched it growing up, then rewatched it, the re-rewatched it, and now then have it
Science
From ‘Formalizing the stability of the two Higgs doublet model potential into Lean: identifying an error in the literature’, uploaded to arXiv on March 9, 2026: Firstly, we believe this to be the first time a non-trivial error in a research level physics paper has been identified through the process
Analysis
Google News picks up on science stories that many outlets are covering. Its reasoning is that the more outlets publish a particular story, the more reader interest the story has. However, the flaw here is that news outlets don’t evaluate all kinds of science developments on an equal footing
Analysis
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
Scicomm
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
Analysis
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,
Scicomm
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
Culture
One of the advertisements during the ongoing T20 cricket World Cup on Star Sports India has been for Sprite, the carbonated beverage from the Coca-Cola Company. In the ad, it's a hot day, two people are irritated by the heat and humidity, and they beat it by taking