After centuries of sky-watching, we are yet to understand the complex nature of clouds It’s an early winter dawn. The lake seems to be steaming, but it is not. A cloud is being born. I am on a hilltop, watching a village in the valley sparkling in the early morning rays when a white sheet […]
IISc’s second campus at Challakere provides an ideal locale to study aerosols and their impact on climate Travelling down the National Highway from Bangalore to Challakere in the Chitradurga district of Karnataka, and past the city limits, I noticed the air becoming fresher to breathe. Could it have been because of the reduced pollution, […]
Researchers, doctors and communities work together to manage a neglected disease The first time Nagendra Kumar P started experiencing extreme pain was when he was a toddler. “He had severe headaches,” says his father, B Pandegowda. “We showed him to small hospitals nearby. He would become better for a few days, but the headaches […]
The Department of Aerospace Engineering is in the process of restoring its plane exhibits In 2004, the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics at Trieste, Italy, published a book titled One Hundred Reasons to be a Scientist. One of the contributors to the book was Roddam Narasimha, whose article, How I Became a […]
The influence of wind currents on humans and non-humans Chennai. 13 December 2016. I woke up in the morning and headed to the tea stall nearby for my daily dose of morning chai. It was windier than usual: my outfit ruffled heavily, and the umbrella I was carrying to protect me from the drizzle […]
The perils and pitfalls of making AI speak like humans In June this year, a Google engineer made a bombshell claim: the Artificial Intelligence (AI) system he had been working on had become sentient – it had become aware of its own existence and begun expressing emotions and feelings. Google summarily dismissed his claims […]
