Slightly Acidic

There’s a passage in an interview of former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan, published by Frontline on September 1, that many people seem to have misunderstood, especially on Twitter, where — perhaps unsurprisingly — it has been reduced to “India shouldn’t ma…

From 'Why not normalise use of AI in writing?'

My friend Dhiya has been writing and publishing one blog post every week for the last 87 weeks in a series she simply calls ‘dilettante’.

On August 24, Levent Alpöge (@__alpoge__) posted on X.com that they had solved a maths problem with Claude’s help in a way that was contrary to a human proof of it, albeit a reputedly unsatisfactory one.

The following is a review of Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination by Seth C.

As a science journalist whose medium of choice is text (“text is king”), the very first sense of what I am going to write about in a science article is often an emotion in my head.

1.

Dear Chief Justice Surya Kant: I commend you for your discovery this week that time is finite.

In a study published in PNAS Nexus on July 14, two researchers affiliated with institutes in France, Italy, and the UK analysed more than 4,400 launches in 16 geographical entities and with 330 rocket configurations to find that every time the cumulative…

The physicist Carlo Rovelli makes a strong case in this essay that consciousness is “of the same nature” as everything else in the universe, but in the course of doing that, he often writes as if the alternatives to dualism — the view that the body and the

From ‘Zero-deforestation commitments in Indonesia’s palm oil sector achieve high compliance but no additionality’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 13, 2026: … we evaluate the compliance and additionality of zero-deforestation commitm…

That thermodynamics has so very many applications is as fascinating as what it so often illuminates.

Daily writing promptIs a little chaos actually good for us?

As silly as it sounds, as a student of mechanical engineering, I am partial to technologies that make use of mechanical forces.

A new PNAS Nexus paper has shed light on a major source of hidden energy waste on the bitcoin network.