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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
IISc has made significant contributions to the development of Tejas, India’s Light Combat Aircraft In July 1940, during the early stages of World War II, the skies over Europe rumbled as the Luftwaffe, Nazi Germany’s air force, launched a massive attack on Britain’s Royal Army and Royal Navy. For months, the two sides battled […]
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 […]
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 […]
From 1945 to 1948, a programme at the Department of Biochemistry provided soya milk as a nutritional supplement The Second World War ended with acute scarcity of food and milk in many parts of India. A year before the war ended, in September 1944, IISc created a new post for a Lecturer in Food […]
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 […]
In November 2016, biochemist and author Pranay Lal’s ground-breaking book Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent was published. It was a first-of-its-kind, definitive book on natural history and geoheritage celebrating everything from fossils to fish, volcanoes to viruses, in a quest to understand the processes that shaped Earth and the life on […]
