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, […]
Scientists from IISc are addressing questions about the biological world using their engineering skills Most mechanical engineers do what we think they do – design and fabricate aircraft, machines, and other such human-made objects. But it turns out that some members of their tribe are also curious about how living things work. One of […]
Developing COVID-19 solution hasn’t been easy for researchers working since the pandemic began, as well as for those who jumped into the foray recently When the country was rocked by the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2021, oxygen conservation became a prime concern. As hospitals designated for COVID-19 became swamped, patients […]
What are the major ethical issues plaguing science, and what are institutions like IISc doing to deal with them? On 14 May 1796, an ambitious country doctor from Gloucestershire in England injected cowpox pus taken from pustules on a milkmaid, Sarah Nelmes, into the arm of James Phipps. Almost immediately, Phipps, who was the eight-year-old […]
