Where have I been?

To my horror I see that it is almost three months since my last post. In fact, that post was on the morning of our visit to Madras, or should I say Chennai, for tourism. The denizens of that great city were probably surprised to know that anyone could think of their home as a tourist destination, but I certainly am one of them. Although I was sick as a dog on the train journey and on the first day of our holiday, and could not visit the Parthasarathi Koil, Kapaleshwarar Koil or Radha Silks with the family, I did manage to go to the beach and the next day to IIT, Mahabalipuram and Dakshina Chitra, and on the way back home we stopped at the University campus. Much water has flowed under various bridges since then. I was in Bombay early February to give a talk at the Tata Institute to honour Shasanka Mohan Roy and l'il ole me was asked to talk about the famous Roy equations of pion scattering. There were two other speakers, Virendra Singh, former director of TIFR who talked about their long collaboration stretching over decades and Anil Gangal who talked about the man. If you think I have not been doing anything, try again. I wrote an article on high precision meson scattering for Current Science which has now appeared inspired by my preparation for this talk. I also wrote a book review on a recent volume of Annual Reviews of Nuclear and Particle Science for Current Science. I was also busy with trying to wrap up some projects, and writing manuscripts. I will soon provide links to all of these with a small precis of each of the contributions. I have also been writing for Lokrajsangathan which may be found there.

So what has happened in the great world of science? First, I read that quantum entanglement has been seen in B-meson systems. I will try and do a post on this. Then some experiments have seen mixing of neutral D mesons for the first time. D mesons contain a charm quark. Such mixing has been seen in B meson systems long ago. I will try and say something about this. Then there is the important news on the MiniBoone experiment from Fermilab which does not see the neutrino anomaly reported by the Los Alamos experiment LSND. So that is a relief. Maybe I will do a post on this as well. Then there was the news that some of the magnets at the LHC have failed. So this may set back the LHC by some time, but I hope it is not serious. Is there anything else that I missed? I saw something about clusters of supermassive black holes. Maybe I should write something about this. Then there was an article on virgin births amongs Komodo dragons. I think that is enough science for 3 months. So, do not despair and keep watching this space.