John Wenz has a fascinating account of a ‘secret’ meeting of scientists held in 1961 at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, which at that time was the biggest telescope available to radio astronomers. The reason it was kept hush-hush was not because they were doing anything nefarious but because these were people who were interested in seeking signs of extra-terrestrial life and that was considered somewhat fringey and they did not want to tarnish their reputations as serious scientists.
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Via David Pescovitz, I came across something called the ‘morph cut’, a video editing technique that can be used to eliminate pauses, stutters, and filler words and provide for smoother-sounding interviews, unlike with a ‘jump cut’ where you can see the abrupt transition. But the catch is that if not done carefully, it can produce unexpected results, like in this clip where a child suddenly materializes behind the speaker.
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When current flows in materials, it generates heat because of the resistance it encounters. This causes the materials to get hot and this has to be accounted for when designing electrical systems in order to avoid fires or meltdowns. This heat is also a major source of energy dissipation and loss. Superconductors are materials that do not have any resistance to the flow of current and thus can cut down energy consumption tremendously.
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Megan Molteni has an article in Wired discussing an old problem: What do you do with scientific information that was obtained unethically? This is an old problem that has been seen in stark forms with Nazi scientists experimenting on Jewish captives prior to and during World War II and the US government experimenting on black people for four decades in the infamous Tuskegee experiments.Molteni brings this up in the context of the genetic modification done on two human embryos using the CRISPR technology. As Molteni says:
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I was intrigued by this demonstration of a plane that has no moving parts and moves silently through space, accompanied by just a blue glow. The abstract of the paper describing it can be read here but the paper itself is behind a paywall.

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The first detection of gravitational waves was in November 2015, a century after Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity predicted their existence. It was a discovery of such importance that the Nobel prize for physics was awarded for it soon after in 2017. But since then there have been a flurry of such waves that are caused by the collisions of massive stellar objects.
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Whale evolution has always fascinated me, ever since I learned that their evolutionary path took them from sea to land and then back to the sea. Here’s an animation showing how the land-to-sea-again transition may have occurred.

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