A Scientific Research Vault
I was looking for some interesting space missions but outside the usual Apollo and Hubble highlights. And then I came across this Reddit thread – interesting space missions – it pulls together a long list of probes that are genuinely fascinating but rarely talked about. The entire post has its roots in this thread.
Read More
In the world of physics, few discoveries challenge our intuition as much as the idea that light could travel at different speeds depending on its direction. For decades, efforts to demonstrate nonreciprocal group delay have been hindered by excessive losses and limited effects. Yet a recent breakthrough in cavity magnonics has achieved a significant demonstration of this phenomenon, without violating fundamental laws like the Kramers–Kronig relations. This discovery taps into the fascinating hybrid interaction between photons and magnons, leveraging magnism to manipulate light in ways previously out of reach.
Read More
The man from Missouri should have been dead by spring 2023. By the time a medical helicopter delivered him to Northwestern Memorial Hospital on a rolling bed of tubes and machines, his body was already struggling to survive. What started as a seasonal flu had curdled into a resistant infection that was essentially melting his lungs from the inside.
Read More
Each one of us, sometimes or the other has this weird habit or maybe obsession of checking if we’ve locked the front door or not. You check once, locked. Check again, still locked. Third check. Fourth check. By the tenth check, you’re not actually discovering anything new, yet you can’t shake the doubt. For people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, this scenario is almost… daily. These individuals aren’t indecisive because they can’t think clearly. Instead, recent neuroscience research reveals that their brains struggle to update beliefs based on new information. A study…
Read More
What if consciousness isn’t about being smart, but about being stuck? I’m sure there comes a time in most of our life, when we’re standing at a crossroad, torn between two paths. Your logical mind says one thing, your gut says another, and the longer you stand there wrestling with the choice, the more uncomfortable you become. That tension, that sense of being trapped between incompatible options, might be the secret ingredient missing from artificial intelligence.
Read More
When was the first time you heard the term, “earthshine”? For me it was while I was reading Arthur C. Clarke’s Earthlight, and there was this passage where colonists on the Moon looked up at Earth hanging in their sky.
Read More
Have you ever realized that at the very beginning, you started out as just one tiny cell. From that single cell, all the different parts of your body, like your brain cells, heart muscles, blood cells, even skin developed. The question is, how does that one original cell somehow “know” what to turn into? How does it decide to become a brain cell or a heart cell, instead of just staying the same?
Read More
I’m not really into top-down approaches. I believe that in most effective systems, decisions happen at the individual level. For instance, take the case of ants or bees, while there’s structure, there isn’t constant centralized control. Individuals act based on local information, and coordination emerges naturally without waiting for hierarchical alignment.
Read More
I’ve never been particularly good at math (at school) and when it comes to physics, the equations made me squint. And yet, I find myself completely captivated by the mechanics of how we fling those massive capsules filled with humans into space. And somehow bring them back alive.
Read More
Have you ever noticed that our eyes don’t focus on every single brick in every building with the same intensity as when we are walking down the street? Instead, our brain “gazes”, narrowing its focus on, which it thinks is super important, like a child chasing a ball towards the road or a cyclist drifting too close. Everything else stays in view, but it fades into the background, without demanding any attention. This is our macula at work, delivering sharp detail exactly where our attention is needed most.
Read More
What if our brain is actually a computer? I can trace that thought back to growing up with Small Wonders on television in the mid-1990s (in India it was aired during the times). That strange little serial where a machine didn’t just calculate, but learned and slowly began to feel familiar.
Read More
Every year as December winds down, I try to close with a book on a topic which is very close to my heart, a ritual I have been trying to do for some time now. This time, the book found me. I thought I’d close with Spaceman but then landed with Encounter with Tiber. It was first published in 1966 by former astronaut Buzz Aldrin and science fiction writer John Barnes. And the book didn’t disappoint me, by page thirty I knew I wasn’t just reading science fiction, I was…
Read More
Scientists and researchers are my intellectual heroes. I’ve spent years reading their papers, following their work, running a science and tech website that tracks breakthrough research. And in between, I’ll admit, I used to wonder what they actually do when they’re not thinking about science.
Read More
Digital convenience is what we aim for, almost every time we open Netflix or YouTube in fact any other OTT apps. We are so hooked with the “next suggested video” option that we hardly think if we actually want to see it or if it truly adds value. In fact, we feel marvelous, as if the internet finally gets me!
Read More
Formation of the first stars in the universe and the evolution of black holes have always been a mystery to astrophysicists. Now, observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may offer a radical new answer to the existence of “dark stars”.
Read More
I remember the exact moment in The Matrix Reloaded when Agent Smith, the then no longer bound by the rules of the system, looks at Neo and says, “Me, me… me too!”
Read More
