How small structures create stunning colours in nature In the 19th century, the piercingly blue morpho butterfly captivated the attention of people worldwide; its blue was so brilliant that one could not take their eyes away from it. Understandably, people wanted to extract the colour from the butterflies for human use, such as dyeing […]
The growth of Green Chemistry A weathered, nearly half-century-old plaque hangs on the wall of Paul Anastas’ office at Yale University – an unusual keepsake for an academic. Its story dates back to the 1970s in Quincy, Massachusetts, where eight-year-old Paul watched his neighbourhood wetlands get taken over by glass-fronted insurance and bank buildings. […]
Organ mimics are helping decode complex diseases On the lab bench, inside a Petri dish nestled between two metal coils, sits an unassuming glob of jelly. But this is no ordinary jelly – it is a squishy gel filled with magnetic particles and cells from the human lung. Once the power switches on, magnetic […]
Demystifying nature’s oldest pigment producers In Shantanu Shukla’s lab, dissecting insects is routine. The well-lit room, located in the Department of Developmental Biology and Genetics (DBG), IISc, is filled with young scientists studying scale insects – tiny plant vampires that feed on the plant phloem sap. The team investigates the intimate relationship between insects […]
Creating under constraint When Umesh Varshney joined IISc as an Assistant Professor, he was excited to dive straight into microbiology research. It was 1991, and he had just returned from his postdoctoral stint at MIT in Cambridge. He planned to study protein synthesis in Escherichia coli and DNA repair in mycobacteria, among other exciting […]
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 […]
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 […]
Scientists are racing to outsmart cancer Mohit Kumar Jolly was reading The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, a popular science book by Siddhartha Mukherjee, when he became impressed by the idea of fighting against cancer. His interest grew exponentially after he started seeing cancer patients every day at the MD Anderson […]
The alluring mystery of an amorphous solid Glass is everywhere. You scroll over it on your phone, you drink from it, it’s in the spectacles perched on your nose and in the windows of your house. But how does it form? To picture that, imagine molten glass. As a liquid, it can flow; its […]
