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 […]
Learning what activates cancer stem cells, which can lead to metastasis, may hold the key to fighting other cancers too Annapoorni Rangarajan, Associate Professor at the Centre for Molecular Reproduction and Developmental Genetics, was bitten by what she calls the “cancer keeda” over two decades ago as a Master’s student at Nagpur University. “What really interested me was […]
Samuelson gave an Institute Colloquium recently in which he discussed his work on copper complexes, and why they matter Ashoka G Samuelson is a professor at the Department of Inorganic and Physical Chemistry, IISc. He joined the Institute after completing his PhD from Cornell University, USA, in 1983. His research is centred on understanding how […]
A peek into the challenges of working in the wild “Field stations are absolutely crucial to the success of ecological research,” says Professor Rohini Balakrishnan, head of the Centre for Ecological Sciences (CES). They form so vital a part of ecologists’ work that Kartik Shanker, Associate Professor at CES, says they’ve “internalised it”. “They are […]
And how the flight behaviour of bees and birds is revolutionising robotics Mandyam Srinivasan is a professor of visual neuroscience at the Queensland Brain Institute and the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering of the University of Queensland. Famous for his distinctive studies on the visual systems of bees and, more recently, birds as well, […]
