What it takes to recycle sewage and rejuvenate the city’s lakes In 1993, when I first visited Bangalore, it felt like a different country to me. I was coming from dry and hot Nagpur, where the sky fades to almost white in summer, and the colour of the Gulmohar flowers is yellowish orange. Here, […]
The soil under our feet is teeming with life, and understanding and nurturing it has a positive impact on our lives A memory. My friend and I followed the ball as it bounced towards the pit in the backyard. Heat wafted up, and the air was saturated with a warm, earthy smell that wasn’t […]
How geologists connect the dots to tell stories of the Earth’s evolution It was a clear but cold July evening in the Kumaon Himalayas in Uttarakhand. Prakash Chandra Arya and his younger brother, Vikas, were on day one of their 15-day trek from a village called Munsiyari to the Milam glacier, more than 4000 […]
Seismologists have their work cut out when it comes to understanding and predicting earthquakes and their impact Beneath the serene snow-capped mountains of the Himalayas, danger lurks. Scientists are increasingly worried about a big earthquake overdue in the Himalayan region, anticipated to have a magnitude greater than 8.0 on the Richter scale. To give […]
Geotechnical engineers, who investigate soils and their properties, play an important and sometimes overlooked role in civil engineering A vacation on a Spanish beach in the 1960s sparked a revolution in the construction industry. French engineer Henri Vidal was piling up sand to build a sand castle when he realised that no matter how […]
Several researchers at IISc are working on technological solutions to tackle some of the causes of climate-induced disasters, and reduce carbon emissions A sizzling heatwave across North India, prolonged power outages, and 20 million dead. Fortunately, this is a work of fiction, the setting in the first chapter of The Ministry for the Future, […]
The study of model organisms is the key to unlocking mysteries about life on earth When I first started working with the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster after my Master’s, many of my friends and family members were greatly amused. After 17 years of education, I had finally admitted that all I was doing was […]
The small mouse has enabled giant leaps in biology research Claudius Galen (129-199 CE), a prominent physician in ancient Greece, obsessively studied anatomy – the science of how our bodies are structured and how our organs function. Since the ruling Roman government prohibited working with human cadavers, he dissected animals instead, to gain knowledge. […]
Neuroscientists at IISc study monkey behaviour to answer fundamental questions about brain function In 2021, Elon Musk took the internet by storm with his video game-playing monkeys. Using technology that transmitted neural data from the monkey’s brains directly to the computer screen, researchers from Musk’s Neuralink Corporation created systems in which the monkeys could […]
Self-organisation is the emergence of order in an initially disordered system and is observed from microscopic to astronomical levels Spiral galaxies. Honey bees. Proteus mirabilis, the urinary-tract-infection-causing bacteria. What do they all have in common? A phenomenon called self-organisation. It transcends scale – from the formation of galaxies to the arrangement of lipids in […]
