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 […]

Up In The Air

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, […]

The Mechanics of Life

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 […]

Battling COVID-19, Wave after Wave

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 […]

The Moral Scientist

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 […]

Taking on TB

India is the world’s tuberculosis capital, accounting for 27 percent of the 10 million patients globally. Understanding how drug resistance emerges and improving vaccine efficacy are key to fighting this disease. Macrophage (red) engulfing tuberculosis bacteria (yellow), taken with ZEISS FE-SEM (Image courtesy: Volker Brinkmann)   In 1890, Robert Koch believed he was going to […]

MONTBLEX: India’s First Major Monsoon Experiment

The first national effort to understand the meteorological phenomenon For about four months from May to September 1990, the Indian summer monsoon was the subject of unprecedented nationwide attention. While the monsoon winds raced from Kerala to the northwest of India in 35 days, less than its usual 45, researchers on land, air and sea […]