IISc’s role in helping Wipro launch its minicomputers in 1981 As one of India’s leading technology companies, Wipro is today largely known for its Information Technology (IT), engineering, and consulting services. But what brought Wipro into the IT industry was its computer systems business in the 1980s. The origins of the company’s most flourishing business […]
Kusala Rajendran, a seismologist at IISc, takes us into the world of earthquakes, and tells us why predicting them is far-fetched at the moment Inspecting trenches in a no man’s land, at the India-Pakistan border, stood Kusala Rajendran and her husband CP Rajendran. Surrounded by the BSF jawans, the Rajendrans were donning the detective’s hat: […]
In the second part of our series on cryptography, we dive into why we are experiencing increasing privacy violations In early February this year, an ethical hacker called Victor Gevers revealed that he could track the movements of 2.5 million Chinese Xinjiang Muslims in real-time on a site that belonged to a Chinese surveillance company, […]
A scientist and his small team of volunteers have steered the cause of plants by creating a unique database, an important first step in the battle for species conservation and habitat restoration On the third floor of IISc’s Biological Sciences building is a room which, at first glance, may seem like a computer science lab. […]
A look at an evolving technology that has been changing how we communicate It was February 2009. A 560 kg satellite named Iridium 33, whirling around the planet in the low earth orbit 789 km above the Taymyr Peninsula in Serbia, met a fatal end. It clashed with the defunct 900-kg Russian satellite, Kosmos 2251. […]
A unique pilot project helmed by a team of scientists from India and Scotland Berambadi (Photo: Rohini Krishnamurthy) About 200 km southwest of Bengaluru is Berambadi, a village nestled between mountains, swathes of agricultural fields, the Hirikere lake, and the Bandipur National Park. This verdant countryside with tidy roads that borders Karnataka’s neighbours Kerala and […]
The story of an IISc scientist who brought molecular techniques into research on the deadly disease in India A young T Ramakrishnan, who lived with his family in Ernakulam in Kerala, helplessly watched his mother being sent to Andhra Pradesh’s Madanapalle sanatorium, one of the few such medical facilities in the country created to […]
The limited success of National AIDS Control Programme (NACP) I and II set up in the 1990s meant that the government had to something different to control HIV spread: India had roughly one-eighth of the world’s HIV burden. And in 2002, the US National Intelligence Council projected that by 2010, about 20-25 million people will […]
Govindarajan Padmanaban is a celebrated biochemist and biotechnologist, known for his work on malaria. In a career spanning 50 years, he has mentored several students, helped establish start-ups and several research institutes. Recently, Padmanaban turned 80 and on 23 March 2018, the Director, Anurag Kumar, released the second volume of his memoir, titled Doing Science […]
What do maps of India have to do with an undergrad course at the Institute? If you attended the closing ceremony of ‘India on Our Mind’ – the exhibition on Indian maps held at IISc from 18 March to 20 April – you might have spotted a bunch of students being given certificates that day […]
