The story of SlipDIISc, IISc’s Ultimate Frisbee club It was a sunny Saturday afternoon in Bangalore. The Gymkhana cricket ground was crowded with heavily sweating fitness enthusiasts, some of whom jogged all around the field in circles while others walked. Some exercised under the shade of the trees, and some played in groups. The […]
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 […]
Field assistants are critical yet underappreciated members of the ecological research community When Raman Sukumar went to the forests of Mudumalai to study elephants for his PhD in 1978, he wanted a local person familiar with the terrain, and experienced at navigating elephant country to guide him. The forest rangers put him in touch […]
A peek into the Central Animal Facility, which supports research in almost 70 labs Prashant and his three colleagues set out for work in the small hours of the morning. Gauribidanur, their hometown, is 80 km from Bangalore, and the train ride and the short walk after that to reach the Central Animal Facility […]
Pankaj Sekhsaria is an associate professor at the Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas at IIT Bombay. In October 2020, he gave a talk based on his book Nanoscale: Society’s Deep Impact on Science, Technology and Innovation in India as part of Paraspar, a lecture series organised by the Office of Communications at IISc. […]
Studying the brain to understand human behaviour involves elaborate experimental set-ups. Researchers at IISc describe how they design these experiments Ever walked into a room and forgot why you went in there? Or struggled to keep your New Year’s resolutions? We have all shown such behaviours at some point or the other. The field […]
Climate change is wreaking havoc on our glaciers With its myriad colours and the imposing mountains in the background, the confluence of two Himalayan rivers in Ladakh, Zanskar and Indus, is a sight to behold. Not surprisingly, the valley where the rivers meet is thronged by tourists. But Rizwan, a local chauffeur, seems less […]
G Padmanaban has spent decades trying to understand the lifecycle of the malaria parasite and develop a cure A few years ago, researchers from Michigan State University tracking malaria in Malawi made a gut-wrenching discovery. The reason why many children with cerebral malaria were dying was because their brain was swelling up so much […]
Experiments in PS Sarma’s lab at the Department of Biochemistry in the 1960s explored a mystery disease caused by excess consumption of seeds of a controversial pulse crop For many years, the Department of Biochemistry at IISc worked extensively on nutrition. Its researchers have analysed the importance of vitamin B1 in our diet. They […]
Several IISc start-ups are exploiting technologies that involve machine learning and related areas for socially-relevant applications such as OCR, healthcare, energy management and compiler development At the office of the Worth Trust, an NGO in Chennai, a visually challenged person walks in with a Tamil book that they want to read. Although they have access […]
