Organ mimics are helping decode complex diseases On the lab bench, inside a Petri dish nestled between two metal coils, sits an unassuming glob of jelly. But this is no ordinary jelly – it is a squishy gel filled with magnetic particles and cells from the human lung. Once the power switches on, magnetic […]
Demystifying nature’s oldest pigment producers In Shantanu Shukla’s lab, dissecting insects is routine. The well-lit room, located in the Department of Developmental Biology and Genetics (DBG), IISc, is filled with young scientists studying scale insects – tiny plant vampires that feed on the plant phloem sap. The team investigates the intimate relationship between insects […]
Creating under constraint When Umesh Varshney joined IISc as an Assistant Professor, he was excited to dive straight into microbiology research. It was 1991, and he had just returned from his postdoctoral stint at MIT in Cambridge. He planned to study protein synthesis in Escherichia coli and DNA repair in mycobacteria, among other exciting […]
Picture a typical morning at the Indian Institute of Science in the early 1980s. Three attenders set out on bicycles, each assigned to a different part of the sprawling campus. Their task is to collect the day’s mail. They stop at departments and offices along their route, gathering letters, handwritten notes, official messages, and […]
The case of the missing radioactive stones As the last flowers cling to their trees, and the spring blossoms begin to fade on campus, the onset of summer is marked by a very special time at IISc: the arrival of Open Day. Gates open, labs light up, and thousands of people throng the campus, […]
Growing up in rural Andhra Pradesh, Murthy Gudipati sometimes slept in fields looking up at the stars. A few decades later, he now studies them as an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena. An IISc alumnus from the 1987 batch, he studies the evolution of different kinds of ice […]
Chasing climate clues in underwater fossils Around 18,000 years ago, the Earth began to thaw. Expansive ice sheets that had covered much of the northern hemisphere for tens of thousands of years began to retreat. Sea levels rose, glaciers collapsed, and the planet slowly emerged from the last ice age. At the same time, […]
What is a myth about IISc that you would like to break?
Growing up in Coorg, Karnataka, CP Poonacha was always engaged in sports and outdoor activities. He enjoyed them so much that he decided to make it his career. After completing a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Physical Education, he started his career at Karnataka University and later worked at Jyoti Nivas College, Bengaluru. He joined IISc […]
How electron spins can boost computing You wake up late. Your assignment is due in two minutes. You grab your laptop with a standard 8 or 16 GB RAM, a 512 solid state drive (SSD) that is “supposed” to be fast, a decent processor that usually gets the job done. You press the power […]
