Explore the complexities of awarding scientific prizes when AI contributes to discoveries, challenging traditional notions of authorship and credit.

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 e…

On Monday night, I kid you not, I dreamt of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. It was only by name, a fleeting mention in a heated conversation I was having with a friend. I’m not sure…

Exploring the ethical dilemmas of accepting funding from controversial sources for scientific research in resource-constrained environments.

For all the ways in which the Indian people are divided these days, they’re seemingly united in their desire to set records. On January 22, a tinkerer named Sohan Rai, a.k.a. “Zikiguy”, said …

Few Indian cities seem able to reveal how power makes landscapes and how landscapes in turn discipline power like Delhi can.

Explore India's strategic exemptions impacting the Aravalli Hills, balancing mineral mining needs against environmental protections and public scrutiny.

A dancer's journey with Andal

Someone asked me recently to name the thing I’ve been most grateful for in 2025. After giving it some thought, I realised it had to be the heat capacity of water. And not just for 2025. Tea i…

Explore the dual significance of Jantar Mantar as both a mathematical observatory and a designated protest site in Delhi.

Explore the limitations of Joel Mokyr's narrative on science, technology, and economic growth, emphasizing broader societal influences and historical complexities.

All that thinking about Joel Mokyr and his prescription to support society’s intellectual elite in order to ensure technological progress took me back to a talk Gita Chadha delivered in 2020, and t…

I don’t like Joel Mokyr’s history of progress and have written about that before. I also have a longer analysis and explanation of my issues coming soon in The Hindu. On December 8 I got more occas…

Many State prison manuals still reflect older assumptions about a prisoner who is physically able

Explore the controversy surrounding Arundhati Roy's book cover, highlighting societal panic over artistic expression and its implications for creative freedom.

You’re probably using AI to write. Both ChatGPT and Google AI Studio prefer to construct their sentences in specific and characteristic ways and anyone who’s been a commissioning editor for a…

Once Isaac Newton showed that a single gravitational law plus his rules of dynamics could reproduce the orbits of planets that Johannes Kepler had predicted, explain tides on Earth, and predict tha…

Explore how Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia intertwines science and literature, challenging the divide proposed by C.P. Snow.

Study of neutrinos: India had the wherewithal in the previous decade to help crack an important scientific mystery, but now China has surged ahead

Until the Election Commission of India provides transparent answers about the Special Intensive Revision process, the celebration of the higher women’s turnout in Bihar must remain qualified

The following jacket advertisement (which is expensive) appeared in The Hindu (and perhaps other newspapers as well; I didn’t check) yesterday: Something seemed off about the messaging here w…

Individuals can’t master the mathematics of cryptography or the molecular biology of vaccines, yet they still trust these fields of science and the suggestions of their exponents to make decisions.…

Bill Gates's shift in climate messaging highlights the dangers of alarmism and its impact on public discourse and policy.

From ‘7 basic science discoveries that changed the world’, Nature, October 29, 2025: Basic research is easily mocked because it can seem impractical, but, in fact, it is a major driver of economic gr...

The problem begins simply enough. A journalist finds a word that seems to fit almost everything. It might be "crisis", "pivot" or the ever-convenient "impact". It's concise, authoritative, and headlin...

Jane Goodall was a celebrated figure in conservation. Her work with chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania redefined primatology. However, more than a few publications as well as co...

We often understand science primarily in terms of its tangible successes, looking to it for advances in medicine, for the foundations of technologies, and for the tools with which to predict and manag...

In this week’s edition of our newsletter, Vasudevan Mukunth looks at a deeper topic -- what it takes to conduct scientific research.

The American-Israeli economic historian Joel Mokyr has been awarded one half of the 2025 special Nobel Prize for economics "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technol...

most recommended: 2, 6, 9, 10, 12

Congratulations, László Krasznahorkai, for winning the Nobel Prize for literature. I still remember reading his The Melancholy of Resistance (1989). It was a mostly unnerving, somewhat frightening ex...

Commentators have long bemoaned the right’s presumptive “war on science.” It may be a war, but science is not the target.

The double-slit experiment has often been described as the most beautiful demonstration in physics. In one striking image, it shows the strange dual character of matter and light. When particles such ...

India has won 22 Ig Nobel prizes to date. These awards, given annually at Harvard University by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, honour studies that "first make people laugh, and then make ...

Maxwell’s demon is one of the most famous thought experiments in the history of physics, a puzzle first posed in the 1860s that continues to shape scientific debates to this day. I’ve struggled to mak...

On September 11, the Supreme Court was asked to urgently hear a petition that sought to cancel the Asia Cup T20 match between India and Pakistan scheduled for September 14 in the UAE. The petition,…

At the heart of particle physics lies the Standard Model, a theory that has stood for nearly half a century as the best description of the subatomic realm. It tells us what particles exist, how the…

And to Paul Feyerabend

In science, paradoxes often appear when familiar rules are pushed into unfamiliar territory. One of them is Parrondo’s paradox, a curious mathematical result showing that when two losing strategies…

A gentle reminder before we begin: you’re allowed to be interested in particle physics. 😉 Neutrinos are among the most mysterious particles in physics. They are extremely light, electrically …

The United Nations has designated 2025 the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. Many physics magazines and journals have taken the opportunity to publish more articles on quantum p…

If you drop a pebble into a pond, ripples spread outward in gentle circles. We all know this sight, and it feels natural to call them waves. Now imagine being told that everything — from an electron t...

In contemporary India, corporate branding has often aligned itself with nationalist sentiment, adopting imagery such as the tricolour, Sanskrit slogans or references to ancient achievements to evoke c...

In conventional ‘macroscopic’ engines like the ones that guzzle fossil fuels to power cars and motorcycles, the fuels are set ablaze to release heat, which is converted to mechanical energy and tra…

US President Donald Trump recently imposed substantial tariffs on Indian goods, explicitly in response to India’s continued purchase of Russian oil during the ongoing Ukraine conflict. These penalties...

AI-generated definition based on ‘Quantitative and analytical tools to analyze the spatiotemporal population dynamics of microbial consortia’, Current Opinion in Biotechnology, August 2022: The Red Q...

Rahul Gandhi is free to voice himself but on the question of the Election Commission “stealing votes”, as he has been claiming to the press, he needs to offer the proof he claims he has right away. By...