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 […]
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 […]
On research, failure and learning to work with the mess The experiment, at least on paper, was simple: watch what happens to the physical forces between cells as a healthy tissue starts becoming cancerous. Push, pull, tension mapped onto something as messy as a living tissue. I remember feeling all tingly when I came […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
How creative pursuits open up new vistas for scientific exploration On a sunny day in the 1600s, in the picturesque town of Lombardy, Italy, an artist was busy at work in a hospital. This might sound strange, but it was a perfectly ordinary occurrence in the life of Leonardo da Vinci. The fifty-something-year-old was […]
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. […]
