Frankly speaking ...

Cut a bar magnet in half. Do you get one piece that is purely north and another that is purely south? In the workshop, the answer is no. Nature never hands you an isolated pole. You get two smaller magnets, each with its own north and south. Keep slicing down to a single atom and you still have a dipole, never a lone pole. Physicists have hunted for the exception for nearly a century: the magnetic monopole, a hypothetical particle carrying a single magnetic pole. Finding one would do far more than settle a bet. It would restore a missing symmetry in the laws of electromagnetism. This article explains why physicists expect monopoles to exist, why one famous sighting still haunts the field, and where the search stands today. The Great Asymmetry: Electricity vs Magnetism Magnetic monopoles matter because of magnetism’s twin: electricity. Electricity and magnetism are two sides of the same coin: electromagnetism. Yet their charges behave very differently: Electric charges exist...

I recently read several pieces on AI and mathematics, including Stephen Wolfram's essay on the future of pure math research , Scientific American on the role of mathematicians , and the World Science Festival podcast AI Creativity: Genius or Gimmick? . This got me thinking about the nature of creativity itself. The real question isn't whether AI can produce novel work. It's whether we keep moving the goalposts of creativity just to keep humans at the centre of the story. The truth is, we don't have a single, settled definition of creativity. But whenever a machine masters something we thought was uniquely ours, our instincts kick in. We begin insisting that true creativity demands consciousness, intention, emotion, or lived experience. In other words, we stop judging the work on its merits and start judging the mind behind it. The AI Effect and the Moving Goalposts We've seen this pattern before. In computer science, it is known as the AI Effect —or as Tesler...

A Puzzle Without a Picture Genome sequencing faces a fundamental physical constraint: modern instruments cannot read a long chromosome continuously from end to end. Instead, they synthesise or capture millions of short sequence fragments called reads. These range from 150 base pairs in high-throughput short-read chemistry to tens of thousands of base pairs on long-read instruments—and well over a million base pairs with Oxford Nanopore ultra-long protocols. Reconstructing a complete genome from these fragments is like solving a multi-million-piece jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the box top. To tackle this challenge, I turned to graph-theoretical assembly frameworks. The Overlap-Layout-Consensus (OLC) paradigm is one of the classic, most intuitive ways to stitch fragments into continuous sequences called contigs. While building reconstruct-strings —a pure and total Haskell implementation of a greedy OLC assembler—I set out to explore sequence reconstruction from first princ...