Are we harming the world in our pursuit to understand it better? Around 7 pm on Mondays, Maya can be found in her natural habitat, carefully seeding a culture to be infected the next day or inoculating a batch of bacteria to be genetically transformed. This is where she is on most days, in […]
Going beyond the ‘reuse, reduce, recycle’ model to curb plastic pollution I turn off the alarm on my phone, slowly wake up, turn the fan switch off, and head to the bathroom. I push paste out of a tube onto my toothbrush, and brush my teeth. Then, I scoop water out of a peach-coloured […]
Two IISc students recount their expeditions into the unknown Satya Chanakya jolted awake when he fell off his bed in the middle of the night. He felt disoriented, wondering if he was dreaming. The room was swaying around him, and he heard a series of announcements through a speaker, asking everyone to remain in […]
Have we pushed the Earth beyond habitable conditions? Twenty four years ago, Govindasamy Bala was a young physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the USA. He and his colleague, Ken Caldeira, were carrying out research using a comprehensive climate model. For the first time, they wanted to test an improbable and controversial […]
IISc’s second campus at Challakere provides an ideal locale to study aerosols and their impact on climate Travelling down the National Highway from Bangalore to Challakere in the Chitradurga district of Karnataka, and past the city limits, I noticed the air becoming fresher to breathe. Could it have been because of the reduced pollution, […]
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, […]
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 […]
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,” […]
