Condensed concepts

 Snowflakes form incredibly diverse structures, seen when they condense onto a plate of glass. Every snowflake is different. On the other ha...

Diamond and graphite are distinct solid states of carbon. They have qualitatively different physical properties, at both the microscopic and...

Spin ices are magnetic materials in which geometrically frustrated magnetic interactions between the spins prevent long-range magnetic orde...

Until this week, I did not know that Bohr ever thought about emergence. Ernst Mayr  was one of the leading evolutionary biologists in the tw...

Perfect crystals are elastic. When a stress is applied and then removed the crystal will bounce back to its original shape. However, in real...

I like "collecting" interesting phase diagrams, partly because they are fun to show students when teaching introductory thermodyna...

As I have written many times before, water is fascinating, a rich source of diverse and unusual phenomena, and an unfortunate source of spur...

What is spin ice ? What its definitive and experimental signatures? A good place to start is the lucid discussion by Roderich Moessner and...

I watched the first episode of  The Forces of Nature  narrated by Brian Cox, The Universe in a Snowflake . [Unfortunately, I don't thin...

Carbonic anhydrase is a common enzyme that performs many different physiological functions including maintaining acid-base equilibria. It i...

My wife and I are often looking for new science demonstrations to do with children. The latest one she found was "bouncing soap bubbles...

Previously, I have highlighted how one of the organising principles for understanding quantum nuclear effects in hydrogen bonding is that of...

Chemical Reviews just published an article Nuclear Quantum Effects in Water and Aqueous Systems: Experiment, Theory, and Current Challeng...

How do you calculate the absorption intensity associated with a molecular vibration? First, why might you care? This is not just a basic s...

Today I am giving a seminar "Effect of Quantum Nuclear Motion on Hydrogen Bonding" in the Chemistry Department at IIT Delhi . My h...

What is excited state proton transfer (ESPT)? Consider a hydrogen bond A-H...B in a molecular system. Suppose the system absorbs a photon ...

Last week I went to an interesting talk What are the effects of dredging on the Great Barrier Reef? by Laurence McCook , at the Global Ch...

Last October I enjoyed attending a meeting,  Water: the most anomalous liquid  at NORDITA. One of the goals of the workshop was to produce a...

Tomorrow I am giving a seminar at the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR) Centre for Interdisciplinary Sciences in Hyderabad. ...

At the NORDITA water meeting Charusita Chakravarty gave a nice talk that featured the phase diagram below. The figure is taken from a n...