Have we pushed the Earth beyond habitable conditions? Twenty four years ago, Govindasamy Bala was a young physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the USA. He and his colleague, Ken Caldeira, were carrying out research using a comprehensive climate model. For the first time, they wanted to test an improbable and controversial […]
Digital technologies are changing research and treatment In 2018, Vijay Chandru was already thinking about pandemics. He was back on the IISc campus, where he had co-founded India’s earliest genomics startup, Strand Life Sciences, nearly 20 years ago. Now a visiting faculty member at the Department of Bioengineering (BE), he started teaching a course on […]
The lives and experiences of IISc’s international students Fourteen years ago, before Fekadu Mihret Geremew came to India for the first time to pursue his Master’s, he had heard a lot about how it was not the ideal place to live. The image he had in mind was a country of traffic congestion, overcrowded […]
Tracing the growth of a model training programme at IISc’s Challakere campus Smita Bala Panda is among the 112 teachers who have travelled from Odisha to participate in the Teachers’ Training Programme at the Talent Development Centre (TDC), in the IISc Challakere campus. She covered the journey from Ganjam district to Bangalore via train, […]
What IISc scientists are doing to help solve the city’s civic challenges In the 2014 Malayalam film Bangalore Days, the character played by actor Nivin Pauly is asked during a job interview about his opinion of being posted in Bangalore city. With a shy smile, he thinks, “Who can say no to Bangalore?” That […]
3D printing is revolutionising manufacturing As a young kid, Shashank HR was fascinated by how things, including his toys, were made. So, he would be thrilled whenever he had a chance to visit his father’s metal fabrication shop, where he witnessed how sheets and rods of steel were shaped into garage doors, gates and […]
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 […]
With a mushrooming elderly population, research on ageing is gathering steam Among Greek myths, the tale of Tithonus is particularly tragic. Eos, the immortal goddess of dawn, fell in love with the mortal Tithonus, a prince of Troy. She begged Zeus, the ruler of Greek gods, to grant Tithonus eternal life, but forgot to […]
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 […]
