There’s more than meets the eye when it comes to ‘junk’ DNA In September 2012, as the final papers from the ENCODE (ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements) project rolled out, the mood among many molecular biologists was triumphant. After more than a decade of coordinated experiments across dozens of laboratories, the consortium made a bold […]
Is it dead? Is it alive? Surely it has to be either, right? Consider a cat in a box – let’s call him Meownstein. Along with him inside the box, there is a radioactive sample (which can decay to produce radiation) and a poison vial with a radiation sensor. If the sample decays, the […]
What microbes are teaching us about life in space In Andy Weir’s fiction novel The Martian, NASA astronaut Mark Watney is stranded alone on Mars after his crew is forced to evacuate. To survive, he begins growing potatoes in his crew’s Martian habitat. Soon, however, he develops a new priority – ensuring the survival […]
What campus event/activity do you look forward to most? (Compiled by Amrapali Datta, Shreya Vashista, Kritika Gaur, Souptika Das, Manauv Vyas Hemakumar)
The perils of image manipulation in science Volume 119, No 38, Figure 1. To most people, this is just a set of incomprehensible scientific data. But this figure, along with those from 13 other papers, is special. They lie at the heart of a high-profile scientific scandal: the downfall of a Nobel Laureate. Unlike […]
Indumati Srinivasan has spent over three decades navigating some of India’s most complex public institutions – from the vast system of the Indian Railways to the research-driven environment of the Indian Institute of Science. Trained as an economist and shaped by years in the Indian Railway Accounts Service (IRAS), she brought rigour and quiet resolve […]
Designing an electric future A quiet hum is redefining mobility. More than a century ago, the rhythm of modern travel was measured by hoofbeats – the rhythmic sound of iron shoes on cobbled streets. Then came the gas-chugging Internal Combustion (IC) engines, whose roars marked a revolution of speed and power. Now, mankind stands […]
Tracing the history of the earliest neural network The year was 1958 when the United States Navy unveiled what they called a thinking machine – a perceptron. It was an IBM 704 equipped to “react” to and learn from its inputs. The giant computer simulator was the brainchild of Frank Rosenblatt, a scientist […]
Scientists are racing to outsmart cancer Mohit Kumar Jolly was reading The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, a popular science book by Siddhartha Mukherjee, when he became impressed by the idea of fighting against cancer. His interest grew exponentially after he started seeing cancer patients every day at the MD Anderson […]
Suhas Mahesh is a man of many talents. He is a material physicist working on building self-driving labs using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to accelerate materials discovery. A Rhodes Scholar currently working with Schmidt Sciences in New York, he also nurses a love for languages, particularly ancient ones like Sanskrit and Prakrit. He has published a […]
