The alluring mystery of an amorphous solid Glass is everywhere. You scroll over it on your phone, you drink from it, it’s in the spectacles perched on your nose and in the windows of your house. But how does it form? To picture that, imagine molten glass. As a liquid, it can flow; its […]
Category: Featured
Connect Asks
What’s your secret to making friends on campus? (Compiled by Ashmita Gupta, Kavi Bharathi R, Sandeep Menon)
Fantastic Fables
Spooky stories of campus past IISc is equal parts a university and an epic, covering several epochs in its century of existence. Stacks of dusty files overflow with correspondence and documents, digital folders burst with names and passwords, and fossilised records lie silently in the farthest corners of the library. Yet, there is more. […]
Crowdsourcing Conservation
How citizens are helping collect research data On the rare occasion that you break away from the tedium of overflowing inboxes to listlessly stare into space, something extraordinarily fascinating could catch your attention. It could be a stray dragonfly perched on the window ledge, or perhaps a tree with a huge canopy farther away. […]
Connecting…
Socialising in the digital age Imagine sitting at Sarvam, basking in the bliss of a good hair day. The weather is pleasant, the sun is timid and a cool breeze is playing its part – the quintessential hyper-marketed Bengaluru weather. Around you, everyone chats happily. There is a reassuring calm within the chaos. A […]
The Scientist and The Artist
How creative pursuits open up new vistas for scientific exploration On a sunny day in the 1600s, in the picturesque town of Lombardy, Italy, an artist was busy at work in a hospital. This might sound strange, but it was a perfectly ordinary occurrence in the life of Leonardo da Vinci. The fifty-something-year-old was […]
Behind the Biosafety Doors
Staff who support high-stakes research A long walk downhill on Silver Oak Marg leads you to the quiet edge of campus, where the bustle of the main roads fades into the murmur of trees. The air feels cooler here. Just past the Combustion Gasification and Propulsion Laboratory (CGPL), there is a gate on the left. […]
‘You need special crazy people … to do science’
Yuri Kivshar is among the foremost authorities in metamaterials as well as nonlinear physics and nonlinear photonics, having made several pioneering contributions to these fields. The award-winning scientist is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, Optica, the American Physical Society, the International Society for Optics and Photonics, and the Institute of Physics. […]
Guests come first
A day in the life of Geetha Ramaswamy A drizzle coats the pathway as Geetha walks steadily towards IISc’s Main Guest House (MGH). Today, she had commuted from her home in Benson Town to IISc by auto rickshaw. The previous evening’s downpour had left her scooter marooned on campus. She quickens her pace to […]
Rising Through the Ranks
Renugopal Murugesan first visited IISc in 1977, at the age of 14, when his father was employed as a construction worker at the old Physics department building. He joined his father as a daily wage labourer in 1981 and later worked as a mason. With the support of IISc faculty and staff, he learnt typing […]