Kabir Firaque

6 days ago | htsyndication.com | Kabir Firaque

Posted On: 2025-04-18 Posted By: Kabir Firaque, NEW DELHI Health & Lifestyle Education Technology International Hindustan Times NEW DELHI, April 18 -- Public perceptions of alien life, shaped largely by science fiction, often revolve around images of humanoid beings or caricatures of animals roaming a planet similar to our own.

6 days ago | hindustantimes.com | Kabir Firaque

Not anymore. Without ruling out the possibility that a rocky planet somewhere out there could be home to some form of life, a new school of scientific thought has been exploring another kind of world that could be potentially inhabitable — or even inhabited. Such as K2-18b, the subject of a promising new study published in The Astrophysics Journal Letters.

1 week ago | hindustantimes.com | Kabir Firaque

In the 1850s, some three decades before the international Date Line was established, the author and mathematician Lewis Carroll puzzled over a question of time. I quote: “Suppose yourself to start from London at mid-day on Tuesday, and to travel with the sun, thus reaching London again at mid-day on Wednesday.

2 weeks ago | hindustantimes.com | Kabir Firaque

The puzzle that launched Problematics in another newspaper decades ago (April 1993) involved a few unknowns and fewer variables. There are at least two kinds of such puzzles. In one kind, you look for usually two integer solutions from one equation, with various constraints ensuring that the solution is unique. We have had a few of those In these columns previously. The other kind involves more than two variables, usually three variables and two equations.

3 weeks ago | hindustantimes.com | Kabir Firaque

There have been some occasions when I have simply lifted a puzzle from an existing collection and presented a modified version with due credit. With a festival due on the date of publication of this episode of Problematics, this is one of those occasions. I need to rush this, so I am depending on the readymade writings of a legend, Martin Gardner, who does not specify whether he created the puzzle or sourced it from somewhere else.