‘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. […]

Growing a Forest of People

Student conference has been fostering India’s conservation community for 14 years   “How many of you have been chased by an elephant?” is not a typical question you’d expect to hear at a conference. But it seems to fit right in at this one; many people raise their hands, some laugh. Standing at the front […]

India on the Minds of IISc’s Undergraduate Students

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 […]

So you think you can explain your research in three minutes?

Students working on ecology, evolution, and conservation from IISc and other institutions in Bangalore came together for a competition to promote student interaction   PhD students are accustomed to giving long presentations. But there are occasions when one is expected to sum up years of work in a short span, sometimes in just a few […]

How is Goods and Services Tax (GST) impacting people from all walks of life?

A group of experts gathered at IISc to discuss its impacts “The 49th challenge in the Blue Whale game is filing GST. Everyone knows what the 50th is and I am not going to elaborate on that. That is the kind of challenge the industry and businesses have had to face,” said Venkatesh Babu, Deputy […]

Maths Department Hosts Annual Conference of Indian Women in Mathematics

“It’s not that women are not ready for science – society is not ready for women, but projects this onto them,” said renowned mathematician Sujatha Ramdorai at a recent panel discussion at IISc titled ‘Women in Mathematics: Perspectives from Science and Mathematics’. The panel was organised as part of the three-day annual conference of the […]

Nobel Laureate Brian Schmidt and the Expansion of the Universe

When Schmidt found proof of accelerated expansion in the 1990s, he thought he had made a mistake Until recently, astrophysicists believed that gravity would slow down the expansion of the cosmos. This belief stemmed from the Newtonian understanding of gravity as a force of attraction: the falling apple and planets staying in orbit are standard […]