How scientists learned to see it coming A failed monsoon triggered the Great Famine of 1876-1878, which killed an estimated 5-10 million people in India. The tragedy sent officials in the British Raj into a frenzy, and the Indian Meteorological Department was tasked with preparing a seasonal forecast of the Southwest Monsoon rains. At […]
How insects traverse impossible distances Somewhere over the Indian Ocean, the globe skimmer (Pantala flavescens) flaps its delicate golden wings, beginning a remarkable relay journey covering up to 14,000-18,000 km between India and Africa. These small insect travellers measure about 4-5 cm in length and are no heavier than a paper clip, yet they […]
What is your favourite monsoon memory?
A life in pursuit of the monsoon The year was 1944. Across Poona (now Pune), then in the Bombay Province of British India, the call for Independence echoed through homes, streets, and public spaces. At the heart of the city stood a house that the locals called “Liberty Hall”. It belonged to Dr VD […]
The growth of Green Chemistry A weathered, nearly half-century-old plaque hangs on the wall of Paul Anastas’ office at Yale University – an unusual keepsake for an academic. Its story dates back to the 1970s in Quincy, Massachusetts, where eight-year-old Paul watched his neighbourhood wetlands get taken over by glass-fronted insurance and bank buildings. […]
For KG Haridasan, IISc is truly home. It was on the campus that he grew up, did most of his schooling and on-the-job training, culminating in a nearly four-decade-long stint which ended with a role of Multi-Tasking Staff at the Department of Mechanical Engineering. One thing that always drove Haridasan was his interest in learning. […]
How informal settings unlock new ways of thinking When he started working at IISc many years ago, Rishikesh Narayanan used to pull people from his lab to get coffee at Prakruthi, an outdoor campus cafeteria that closed down in 2020. “I am a coffee addict,” says Rishikesh, now Professor at the Molecular Biophysics Unit […]
Where chaos, curiosity, and clarity reign equally Amrit Mahendra Joseph still gets a faraway look in his eyes when you bring up his first-year undergraduate physics lab at IISc. The former UG student, who just completed his Master’s in mathematics, laughs about it now, but back then, an incident involving the impulse-momentum theorem felt […]
Research before the digital era When Raghavendra Gadagkar, Professor and National Science Chair at the Centre for Ecological Sciences (CES), IISc, was a graduate student, he came across a 1958 article in Scientific American by American psychologist Eckhard H Hess. Hess had done research on imprinting in animals and written about how early experiences […]
Over the past 45 years, Gautam R Desiraju has made contributions to science that have put him in a rarified international plane. A pioneer in crystal engineering, Desiraju has been at the vanguard of the field he helped create, though his interests have extended well beyond his scientific area to philosophy, history, geopolitics, and even […]
