How did life emerge on Earth? (Spoiler alert: We still don’t know) On a cold winter evening in 1952, in a dimly lit lab at the University of Chicago, Stanley Miller, a 22-year-old graduate student, stared at the murky brown sludge in the shake flask in front of him, his stomach sinking. Days of […]
The consequences of leaving females out of biological studies Abha Khandelwal vividly remembers some of her unusual cardiac cases, a lot of them women. Like the 35-year-old woman who was watching her son play football when she suddenly felt nauseated. The mother brushed it off, wanting to stay and watch her son’s game. […]
Can scientists solve the conundrum of consciousness? Sometime in the late 1980s, two Oxford scientists examined PS, a patient who had suffered damage to the right side of her brain. The damage left her unable to notice things to her left. Even when she drew objects, she would draw their right sides perfectly […]
The lensing of waves is helping us look deeper into space Arthur Eddington was growing anxious. It was nearly 2 pm on 29 May 1919. The British astronomer was standing on a plateau overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in the west African island of Príncipe. A rare solar eclipse, not seen in 500 years, […]
Going beyond the ‘reuse, reduce, recycle’ model to curb plastic pollution I turn off the alarm on my phone, slowly wake up, turn the fan switch off, and head to the bathroom. I push paste out of a tube onto my toothbrush, and brush my teeth. Then, I scoop water out of a peach-coloured […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Cryo-EM, an emerging technique, is allowing scientists to better zoom in on cells and molecules “Like any living organisms, we are a bag of water, formed from billions of cells which all are small bags of water. Since air is not transparent to electrons, an electron microscope must operate under vacuum – which […]
IISc’s second campus at Challakere provides an ideal locale to study aerosols and their impact on climate Travelling down the National Highway from Bangalore to Challakere in the Chitradurga district of Karnataka, and past the city limits, I noticed the air becoming fresher to breathe. Could it have been because of the reduced pollution, […]
