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 […]
Syed Ameenulla, who joined IISc as a lab assistant and went on to be a scientific officer, recalls his involvement in the Institute’s monsoon experiments In the monsoon of 1979, Chandipur beach in Balasore, Odisha was host to a small group of researchers from Bangalore. The team, from IISc and the National Aeronautical Laboratory (NAL), […]
An IISc scientist’s work on a local solution for water and power Baliram Nag and I arrive on his bike at the Bastar District Collector’s residence, at the end of a leafy, secluded road in Jagdalpur. As we make our way past the security guards, they greet Bali warmly and ask him where the “vaigyanik” […]
Studying how a changing monsoon could affect our biodiversity Scientists predict that the current bout of climate change, induced by human activities, will severely impact the monsoon. How will the expected change in this weather system affect India’s rich biological diversity? Given the complexity of both the monsoon and anthropogenic climate change, the answer is […]
KP Sinha, a versatile physicist whose association with IISc stretches back almost fifty years, will turn 90 in July 2019 KP Sinha is an unusual man. Getting one PhD is hard work, but he chose to do two. And rare though it is for theoretical physicists to work in more than one field, Sinha mastered […]
A look at an evolving technology that has been changing how we communicate It was February 2009. A 560 kg satellite named Iridium 33, whirling around the planet in the low earth orbit 789 km above the Taymyr Peninsula in Serbia, met a fatal end. It clashed with the defunct 900-kg Russian satellite, Kosmos 2251. […]
American neuroscientist Michael Zigmond’s research shows that physical exercise could go a long way in fighting Parkinson’s disease Michael Zigmond is a believer. “I don’t know why anybody wouldn’t want to be a neuroscientist,” quips the IISc-DST Centenary Chair Professor. Notwithstanding his evangelism about the virtues of a career in neuroscience, Zigmond found his own […]
It was in 1946 that Dhawan arrived at the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT, now Graduate Aerospace Laboratories), wanting to work with Hans Liepmann. But the Indian students Liepmann had worked with until then had given him the impression that “perhaps the select group that came to Caltech from India […]
A cell for the Application of Science and Technology to Rural Areas (ASTRA), now Centre for Sustainable Technologies (CST), was created at IISc in 1974 to initiate and promote work of rural relevance as a weapon against poverty. IISc’s then Director, Satish Dhawan, who was deeply concerned about science and society, invited Amulya Reddy [a […]
Is the P value as reliable as we believe? This article examines the meaning and limitations of this ubiquitous measure of significance “The null hypothesis is never proved or established, but is possibly disproved.” – Ronald A Fisher Statistics is a versatile field that emerged from 17th century political science and state governance. In […]
