Electronic City Was Not Built in a Day

The story of Rama Krishna Baliga, a government bureaucrat who laid the foundation for Electronic City, which eventually led to Bangalore becoming the “Silicon Valley of India” Ragavendra R Baliga has fond memories of his father, Rama Krishna Baliga. “There’s an article my father wrote for my medical school journal after he retired. [In that], […]

Keepers of History

The need for archives in academic institutions   In a pivotal scene in the sensational Christopher Nolan film, Oppenheimer, the protagonist, J Robert Oppenheimer, meets Danish physicist Niels Bohr while struggling with his research at Cambridge University in the early 1920s. Bohr urges Oppenheimer to move to Germany and study under the famed physicist and […]

Mining for White Gold

India is betting big on lithium-ion batteries, but at what cost?     In 1817, Johan August Arfwedson, a Swedish lawyer and mineralogist, was studying the mineral petalite in the laboratory of the renowned chemist Jacob Berzelius. His investigations revealed that the mineral mainly contained aluminium, silicon and oxygen. But around 4% of the composition […]

How a Physicist Became a Mathematician

2023 marks the birth centenary of the influential mathematician Harish-Chandra who spent two important years at IISc   “The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics,” declared the Italian astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei in an essay titled The Assayer published in 1623. Mathematics is an indispensable tool for physicists who strive […]

‘Why Can’t We Make Small Talk About Science?’

Kollegala Sharma has worked as a science communicator for over 40 years. After quitting his PhD in radiation biology, he worked as an Assistant Editor for Science Reporter – CSIR-NIScPR’s magazine – then as a Kannada science columnist in the newspaper Kannada Prabha, and as a chief scientist at CFTRI, Mysuru. He has written articles […]

Is Digitising Archival Material Really a No-Brainer?

Digitisation helps preserve valuable material as well as provide access to it. But getting there and beyond can be a thorny process   As staff in an archive, if there’s one thing we learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is how important digitised material can be to researchers. With lockdowns and several travel restrictions in […]

GNR Taught Us to Avoid the Well-trodden Path

Manju Bansal, INSA Senior Scientist at the Molecular Biophysics Unit (MBU), joined the department in 1972 after completing her BSc and MSc from Osmania University, Hyderabad. She completed her PhD under GN Ramachandran, working with him on theoretical modelling of the triple helical structure of collagen. On the occasion of his birth centenary in 2022 […]