Eternality is an impossible concept. Nothing lasts forever; time eventually claims everything. However, despite being an inevitability, Death depends on your point of view: after all, the final moments of a molecule and a star are hardly at all alike. Just like in life, there is great diversity in death. Looking at these various viewpoints of death might just shine some light on our existence.

Let’s Start at the Start: Quarks

Quarks are the tiniest particles currently known to science. Three of them put together make neutrons and protons, to give a comparison point. Despite being the very basis of matter, though, they are incredibly short-lived…

A while ago, I was chatting with a friend about college. It was mostly complaining: both of us were swamped with work, and neither had the motivation to actually do any of it. The conversation was like dozens of others I had; it was the usual bantering mixed with grumbling about grades and whatnot, but one text message stuck in my mind. Our professor had refused to take the assignment submissions over the weekend because then the TAs would have to work on a Sunday, something he didn’t want them to do. I told this to my friend, who had…

As things go, I am not a writer. I much prefer to read and edit others’ work; writing all by myself is not something I am naturally gravitated to. I have tried writing twice before and given up both times, making this blog my re-re-entry into writing.

The first time I tried to write was way back in sixth grade when I discovered the Oz series. I was enamored by the magical world built by L. Frank Baum and had a childish desire to create one of my own. I’d also read Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, both of which…

Black holes are the most extreme places in the known Universe, sucking everything in with no hope of recovery. Not even light can escape their gravitational pull. It thus seems counterintuitive that any process can take energy from one, yet there are not one but multiple ways by which it can be done. To understand the how and the why of their workings, we first need to understand the very nature of black holes themselves.

Black holes are created by the collapse of supermassive stars, ones dozens of times the mass of our sun. When these giants run out of…

One of the things I hate most is hostile architecture. Wikipedia defines it as ‘an urban-design strategy that uses elements of the built environment to purposefully guide or restrict behavior.’ In practice, this refers to making common public spaces less accessible to everyone, just so that the most vulnerable of us can’t use them for, say, sleeping on. Cities spend millions outfitting ledges, railings, benches, and most other viable surfaces with nails, spikes, and bars to the benefit of absolutely nobody, just so that some poor person somewhere has to sleep without a roof over their head.

If you have ever taken a science class, you must have heard at some point or the other that glass is a liquid, albeit one which flows very slowly. As proof, you would be told about old buildings with a noticeable difference in thickness between the tops and bottoms of window panes. This, my physics teacher said, proved that glass flows and is thus a fluid. I unfortunately only got to know he said this after class because I was asleep during it; thus, I was unable to correct him, so I take the opportunity to do so now. …

According to Google, approximately 20% of searches on its app are done through voice, and that number is only set to grow as time passes. Voice search is, in the end, far more accessible than typing. There is still some awkwardness over using it in public, but for the most part, people are comfortable asking Siri or Alexa to do any number of tasks for them, from setting an alarm to buying groceries online. As the Internet of Things continues to grow, virtual assistants will be able to do a whole lot more. …

Just yesterday, I saw a Whatsapp video claiming that governments don’t ban alcohol and cigarettes despite their clear negative impact on public health because doing so would reduce their budget, as both have a high tax percentage and thus contribute significantly to government coffers. The rest of the video went far off into insanity, claiming cancer is created by the mind and that if you are happy, you will never fall ill, so I won’t go into disproving that.
At first glance, the argument seems logical, if a tad bit conspiratorial: after all, why else would these societal net negatives be…