Dilip D'souza: Read stories by Dilip D'souza on Mint.

We can also expect India's population to grow steadily older. Thus the prospect that we are staring at: A population that ages, that will grow before it starts shrinking.

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And just so, we age gracefully

5 min read . 29 Mar 2024

The further a galaxy is from us, the faster it is receding from us. In other words, the red shift of a given galaxy doesn’t just tell us how fast it is moving; it is also a measure of its distance from us.

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Don’t take tension, but the universe expands

5 min read . 21 Mar 2024

Gokhale bridge at Andheri in Mumbai reopened after 15 months of repair work following a partial collapse of the bridge.

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Things a few calculations tell us

5 min read . 14 Mar 2024

Pluto was “reclassifed” in 2006—as a “dwarf planet”. It still goes around the Sun, but it no longer qualified as a full-fledged planet, like the other eight.

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Searching for an invisible Ninth

5 min read . 08 Mar 2024

How many grains of sand on our planet Earth? Right at this instant, there is some gargantuan number that answers that question, though I have no idea what it is, nor how to get its value, nor even how to estimate it.

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The finite that hints at the infinite

5 min read . 29 Feb 2024

When the Bandra-Worli Sea Link opened in 2009, plenty of Mumbaikars drove across for a joyride, resulting in a huge rush in those first few days. The rush subsided as the novelty wore off.

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A spectacular bridge that few use

5 min read . 22 Feb 2024

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella told a gathering of “developers and technological leaders” in Bengaluru that India was expected to overtake the US as the largest developer community on GitHub by 2027. (AP)

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Rhetoric or reality: Focus on per capita

5 min read . 15 Feb 2024

What Ingenuity amounts to is an incredibly sophisticated experiment in science and engineering.

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The little helicopter that could

5 min read . 09 Feb 2024

The Earth’s radius is 6,371km. So even the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia, which penetrated to a depth of over 12,000m, completed less than 0.2% of the journey to the centre of our world. (Nasa)

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Journey to the certainty of death

5 min read . 26 Jan 2024

This artist rendering released by Nasa shows Voyager 1 spacecraft barreling through space. On 12 September 2013 Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space, or the space between stars, more than three decades after launching from Earth.

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When signals in space get a response

5 min read . 18 Jan 2024

Aditya-L1 will be stationed at the first Lagrangian point, which is what the L1 in the name of the spacecraft means.
(Kiren Rijiju X)

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The point where Aditya stays put, almost

5 min read . 11 Jan 2024

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2024: Year of the tetrahedrals and triangles

5 min read . 04 Jan 2024

In their 2007 paper, mathematician Persi Diaconis and two colleagues wrote that vigorously flipped coins 'tend to come up the same way they started' and that for natural flips, the chance of coming up as started was about 0.51. (BCCI Women-X)

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How magicians control flip of a coin

5 min read . 28 Dec 2023

Scientists showed that their bees used “less than” and “greater than” to understand that zero means nothing.

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Bees understand zero means nothing

5 min read . 21 Dec 2023

Neil Sloane, chairman of the OEIS Foundation.

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The 20th is 22 septillion plus

5 min read . 14 Dec 2023

$Pi is an “irrational” number, which means it cannot be expressed as a fraction. In this bill, the tip is $3.14, and 3.14 is, of course, the fraction 314/100—close to but not actually pi. Accurate to the first 10 places after the decimal point, pi is 3.1415926536.$ Premium