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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
