Snipette

Fire for Plants

Thuận Sarzynski — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 07:01:01 GMT

Is fire really evil? Maybe it’s just a natural part of the environment.

Air Frying

Abbey — Fri, 16 Aug 2019 07:01:01 GMT

Ever wondered how to deep-fry without oil? This is almost, if not quite, the same.

Geoengineering

Thuận Sarzynski — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 07:01:01 GMT

Here’s a low-tech tool to reverse climate change

Operational Definition

Badri Sunderarajan — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 07:01:01 GMT

How to measure the immeasurable — and why it can sometimes go wrong.

The Criminal Mind

Manasa Kashi — Fri, 26 Jul 2019 07:02:54 GMT

Criminals usually pay for their misdeeds. But who is really to blame for crime?

Adrian Raine is a renowned criminologist. He teaches psychology in the University of Pennsylvania and has written four books, all on abnormal psychology and crime. Raine has studied criminals extensively and taught courses on them, and routinely tells students to feign sleep for their own safety if they ever have an intruder.

He also tells another story:

In the summer of 1989, he took a trip to Bodrum, in Turkey. It had been a long day of travel, and it didn’t take long for him to fall sound asleep. Certainly, it helped that Bodrum was a relatively quiet city, with little traffic and honking at night.

Shortly after 3 a.m., he awoke when he heard the window creak. He could just about make out a shadow silhouetted by the streetlight. He panicked.

And, contrary to everything he know about criminals and their behavior, he attacked.

How To Train Your Keyboard

Badri Sunderarajan — Fri, 19 Jul 2019 07:01:01 GMT

How your next word is predicted — and how you can make it more accurate.

Frame of Reference

Melanie Fairhurst — Fri, 12 Jul 2019 07:01:01 GMT

Can diagnoses depend on your doctor’s mother tongue?

My passion for the nuances of language has deep roots in who I am as a person. I study intercultural communication: it’s about how people from different cultures interact with each other. About how compatible their communications are, and what happens when they aren’t.

The real moment things fell in place for me, however, can be traced to a single story a lecturer told in my second year.

It was about bilingual people. Being diagnosed by a doctor. The results were different depending on which language they used.

Kings of the Outback

Paul Cathill — Fri, 05 Jul 2019 07:01:01 GMT

Camels in the land of kangaroos? Yes, you got that right.

High Vibrational Music

Will Kenway — Fri, 28 Jun 2019 07:01:02 GMT

It’s worth paying attention to what type of music we listen to.

Quantum Computing

Sidharth Jain — Wed, 26 Jun 2019 07:01:02 GMT

Quanta in a Nutshell (part 4)

Form bits to qubits: how computers leverage quantum quirks run things even faster

By now, I think you’ve got a pretty basic idea of what quantum mechanics is, and how things behave in the quantum world. But in this last part, I would like to shine some light on the topic “quantum computing”, which (as you might have guessed) uses quantum physics in the field of computers.

So let’s start with the basics of computing. Not of quantum computing, but of traditional computing. In classical computers, everything is represented by 0’s and 1’s, and these are known as “bits”. Each bit of information is just that. Either “yes” (or “on”, or “1”) or “no” (or “yes”, or “0”) answer to a question.

You might wonder: how does a computer, that does millions of different things, use only two numbers for all of that? To get that, let’s clear up some basics.