Modern education writes Professor Padmanabhan Krishna — physicist and Trustee of the Krishnamurti Foundation India — produces sharp minds and minds blind to themselves. Drawing on his scientific training and nearly three decades in the orbit of J. Krishnamurti, the philosopher whose dialogues with David Bohm became The Ending of Time, Krishna argues that humanity’s outer scientific ambitions and its inner hunger for wisdom have been falsely severed. From Galileo’s persecution to the hardening of institutional religion, he traces how this rift opened — and sets it against older traditions of inquiry: the Buddha, Socrates, the Upanishads. His central claim is unsparing: science and spirituality are not rivals but twin investigations into two dimensions of the real — and recovering their unity may be the only honest answer to the fractured modern mind.
Gravity‑assist flybys, or gravitational slingshots, are essential to modern deep‑space exploration because they allow spacecraft to gain heliocentric energy without expending propellant. By passing behind a moving planet, a probe undergoes an exchange of linear momentum that increases its Sun‑centered velocity while leaving its speed relative to the planet nearly unchanged. This fuel‑free transfer of orbital energy is indispensable for reaching the outer Solar System, where vast travel distances and the prohibitive propellant demands of direct propulsion make conventional trajectories unworkable. Gravity assists provide the momentum needed to access high‑value astrobiological targets such as Europa and Enceladus — icy moons whose subsurface oceans, sustained by tidal heating, make them prime candidates in the search for extraterrestrial life. By reshaping trajectories through planetary and lunar encounters, mission designers can conserve fuel for complex scientific operations, including plume sampling and close‑range reconnaissance, thereby enabling ambitious exploration that would otherwise be impossible.
When John Bell graduated from Queen’s in mid-1949, he was lucky that, following the invention of radar and the atomic bomb in the Second World War, physics was very much in favor with the powers-that-be. In particular, under the leadership of John Cockcroft, the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell was just getting into its stride. Doubtlessly, many physicists would have liked to get a job there, so it was remarkable that a new graduate without experience. and without even a PhD, was appointed, and more than that, there was even competition for his services.
The organization's aim was fundamental research in atomic physics, with no commercial or defence work, and John Bell was highly valued.
Intra-uterine fetal surgery is relatively new and a costly procedure. It requires a large, collaborative team in which each member is aware of their co-worker's role. Though considered a unique speciality, intra-uterine fetal surgery evolved alongside advances in ultrasonography, the establishment of fetal medicine, and the increased acceptance of fetoscopy for diagnosis and therapy in desperate situations.
Most intelligent tasks we perform in our lives, we learn those skills through examples rather than being told step-by-step how to do them. For example, no one told us how to recognize the numbers, but showed us many examples, and our minds figured out some subconscious rules to distinguish a “1” from a “2” and all the other digits. Scientists quickly realized that if machines must do complex tasks, they cannot be taught algorithmically, with step-by-step instructions, as we ourselves may not know these logical steps, but rather by showing many examples of the correct behavior. Although that was the holy grail of AI, machine learning was a hard task.
This article is an overview of the oldest electromagnetic radiation in the Universe, known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), representing a snapshot of the cosmos approximately 380,000 years after the Big Bang. The author discusses how precise measurements from COBE, WMAP, and Planck telescopes have given us clues about when and how the CMB formed, and helped us refine our understanding of the Universe's composition, age, and geometry.
Modern education writes Professor Padmanabhan Krishna — physicist and Trustee of the Krishnamurti Foundation India — produces sharp minds and minds blind to themselves. Drawing on his scientific training and nearly three decades in the orbit of J. Krishnamurti, the philosopher whose dialogues with David Bohm became The Ending of Time, Krishna argues that humanity’s outer scientific ambitions and its inner hunger for wisdom have been falsely severed. From Galileo’s persecution to the hardening of institutional religion, he traces how this rift opened — and sets it against older traditions of inquiry: the Buddha, Socrates, the Upanishads. His central claim is unsparing: science and spirituality are not rivals but twin investigations into two dimensions of the real — and recovering their unity may be the only honest answer to the fractured modern mind.
The search for Earth-like planets around nearby stars is one of the most ambitious goals in modern astronomy, driven by the hope of discovering life beyond Earth. Yet these worlds are extraordinarily difficult to detect because they lie extremely close to their much brighter parent stars, whose overwhelming glare can conceal the faint light reflected by an orbiting planet. As a result, astronomers must develop highly sophisticated telescopes and imaging techniques capable of suppressing starlight and revealing the hidden planets nearby. This article explores the nature of this challenge and the innovative technologies that may soon allow us to directly observe Earth-like worlds around other stars, bringing us closer to answering the age-old question of whether we are alone in the Universe.
John Bell’s work moved discussion of quantum theory forward, from the sterile situation dictated by the Copenhagen interpretation, to one free from restraint, where a wide variety of new ideas were put forward, and no careers were ruined. His work was central in most of the new ideas, but even over and above that, his open-minded ethos encouraged fresh thinking in every area. In particular it played a substantial part in the emergence of quantum information theory.
This article presents an extended dialogue between Angshuman Guha, a researcher with hands-on experience in neural networks dating back to 1993, and Google’s large language model (LLM), Gemini. It explores a set of closely connected questions at the intersection of AI and cognitive science. Are modern LLMs genuine reasoning systems, or are they sophisticated Stochastic Parrots that recombine language without understanding? Do the so-called “emergent abilities” of large models reflect a real shift in machine capability, or are they artifacts of how we measure performance? And perhaps most fundamentally: can a system trained entirely on human-generated text be said to produce anything like “original thought”?
