The Divecha Centre for Climate Change was set up in IISc in 2009 with funding from US-based philanthropists, Arjun and Diana Divecha, and the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, founded by British investor Jeremy Grantham. Since its establishment, the Centre has focussed primarily on research, and on raising awareness on climate change […]
An interactive climate change calculator from IISc reveals the path we can take to ensure that global temperatures are kept in check. It also shows us the path to disaster On a sunny spring afternoon at the Rose Garden in the White House, the US President Donald Trump made a sweeping proclamation. “We’re getting out,” […]
How researchers at IISc are working on turning research on translation to translational research When Saumitra Das was a postdoc at the University of California, Los Angeles, he discovered how to inhibit polio virus translation. That is, how to stop the virus from hijacking its host cell’s machinery to manufacture its own proteins. Das had […]
And how its alumni shaped it in the years that followed IISc set up its Department of Aeronautical Engineering in 1942 – bang in the middle of World War II. It was the year that the Nazis were to begin acting on their horrific plan for a “Final Solution”, that the Japanese military strengthened its […]
What goes on at IISc’s high-speed wind tunnel complex? In 2015, an Italian tiltrotor military aircraft AW609 was on a test flight at high speeds and it crashed a few minutes after taking off, claiming the lives of both its pilots. Investigating the crash, the air-accident investigation agency ANSV pointed out that insufficient wind tunnel […]
One of the largest shock tunnels in a university setup, India’s first hypersonic shock tunnel (HST) was built in 1973 at IISc by NM Reddy, who had studied under Irvine Israel Glass and Satish Dhawan. After holding several positions abroad, Reddy returned to India in 1970 and introduced shock tubes and shock tunnels in India […]
Doctors and scientists are on a mission to understand this complex neurodegenerative disorder One morning, Ragini, a resident of Chennai, caught a glimpse of her 67-year-old mother, Lakshmi, using a toothbrush on her own reflection in the mirror. Ragini was taken aback by what she saw – her mother was in good mental health and […]
Amogh Kinikar, who did his Master’s in Physics at IISc, on why graphene is a fascinating material In 2012, I found myself in the Department of Physics at IISc, holding a five-and-a-half feet tall, extremely top-heavy object called a dip stick. It was a long narrow vacuum chamber that could be inserted into vessels containing […]
Rama Govindarajan is a renowned scientist whose work lies in the area of fluid dynamics. The recipient of several awards, in 2007 she received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for her “original contributions to the understanding of instabilities in shear and non-parallel flows, flow entrainment, turbulent transition and small-scale hydraulic jumps.” She remains the only […]
It can help make the best use of available resources, says IISc’s Deputy Director Microorganisms, often described as protein-producing factories, are widely used by industrial biotechnologists to produce human proteins of therapeutic interest. One such example is human insulin, produced by the bacterium Escherichia coli (better known as E. coli) and more recently, by the […]
