Hi-Tech Healthcare

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 […]

Layer by Layer

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 […]

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 […]

Live Long and Prosper

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 […]

I, Robot

Researchers at IISc and ARTPARK are building robots that will soon become an integral part of human environments The Terminator movies and several science fiction books have painted a picture of robots as mostly evil overlords bent on wiping out humanity. The reality is that although robots have evolved significantly in the last few decades, […]

Can Solid Tissues Flow?

Cells can apply and sense forces to communicate and coordinate with each other. Scientists and engineers have teamed up under the mechanobiology banner to study these cellular forces   The outermost and the innermost surfaces of any organ are lined by the ‘epithelium’, a tissue composed of cells arranged in a sheet. For instance, the […]