A Scientific Research Vault
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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!
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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”.
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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!”
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Last week I was flying across cities because of office work and this time, I was accompanied by Daryl L. Scott’s debut novel The Andronaut’s Journey.
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If I ask you, what scene in The Matrix that’s always stuck with you, I’m sure most of us would say, the bullet-dodging or the red pill. But for me it’s when Morpheus tells Neo that what he thinks is real is actually just electrical signals interpreted by his brain.
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Have you ever looked at a chart and thought “this looks like something I’d see on social media, so, it’s not a serious study”? I always take it in with a grain of salt.
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For decades, scientists believed that when a cell divides, its genetic material, called the genome, temporarily loses its 3D organization. And it consequently becomes a “blank slate” before rebuilding itself.
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I was very young when I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey. I think that was the moment when my awe with AI began. For me, HAL 9000 epitomized the “perfect” AI assistant. An intelligent machine, which is always next to you, adaptable with how you speak and is super capable of managing complex operations, and of course seemingly infallible.
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A team of researchers at MIT has developed a new generative AI approach called FlowER (Flow matching for Electron Redistribution). It’s a way to use AI for predicting chemical reactions, but what caught my attention is how they approached one of the biggest pitfalls in this area, which is, keeping the predictions physically real.
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