Nobel Prize: how Penrose, Genzel and Ghez helped put black holes at the centre of modern astrophysics

NASA/JPL-Caltech The award of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics to Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez will be greeted with enormous pleasure by physicists and astronomers worldwide. It recognises the central importance of black holes in modern astrophysics, and the unique contributions of these three scientists in establishingContinue Reading

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KKR vs CSK IPL 2020 Score: Chennai Super Kings will look to strike early.© BCCI/IPL Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) have won the toss and opted to bat against last season’s runners-up Chennai Super Kings (CSK) in the 21st match of the 13th edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) on October 7. TheContinue Reading

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Excel errors: the UK government has an embarrassingly long history of spreadsheet horror stories

TeodorLazarev/Shutterstock When the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, first said the country would develop a £12 billion “world-beating” system for testing and tracing cases of COVID-19, few people probably imagined that it would be based around a £120 generic spreadsheet program. Yet the news that the details of 16,000 positiveContinue Reading

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Why you should never use Microsoft Excel to count coronavirus cases

PixieMe/Shutterstock Public Health England has admitted that 16,000 confirmed coronavirus cases in the UK were missed from daily figures being reported between September 25 and October 2. The missing figures were subsequently added to the daily totals, but given the importance of these numbers for monitoring the outbreak and makingContinue Reading

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Picture of the lake at Grímsvötn.

The ice-covered Grímsvötn volcano on Iceland produced an unusually large and powerful eruption in 2011, sending ash 20km into the atmosphere, causing the cancellation of about 900 passenger flights. In comparison, the much smaller 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull led to the cancellation of about 100,000 flights. Understandably, any mention ofContinue Reading

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IPL 2020: Dinesh Karthik revealed his new look ahead of the game against Chennai Super Kings.© Instagram Dinesh Karthik, Kolkata Knight Riders captain, took to Instagram on Wednesday to flaunt his new look and aced the “Break the Beard” challenge after being nominated by Mumbai Indians all-rounder Kieron Pollard. “@kieron.pollard55Continue Reading

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