Shishir Sankhyayan, a PhD student in the Physics Programme at IISER Pune has been involved in two major astronomical discoveries that have received world-wide attention-- the supercluster Saraswati, and 25 rare Giant Radio Galaxies. In this feature article, Harshini Tekur gives us a detailed bre...

The glucose-insulin connection in type 2 diabetes mellitus is well established and the treatment regime is centered on lowering glucose levels through insulin. With the best available treatment being a combination of medication and changes in lifestyle, a cure for diabetes has been eluding us. Pro...

The CMS experiment is a general purpose detector which is used to study the results of high energy proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Analyzing the collision data gives particle physicists insight into the fundamental particles that make up our universe, and the int...

Karishma Bansal, an IISER Pune alumnus, is part of a team of researchers that detected for the first time, two supermassive black holes orbiting each other, in a galaxy about 750 million light years away from Earth. She is also the lead author of the paper 'Constraining the Orbit of the Supermassive...

In the introductory solid state physics courses, lattice vibrations in a crystal are typically introduced by considering first a hypothetical one-dimensional chain of atoms, which can be solved fully making it easier to grasp the idea of phonons (quanta of lattice waves) without really worrying abou...

In contrast to the mundane classical world we experience in our daily life, the quantum world is known to be both elusive and strange - like the Shroedinger's cat that can be both alive and dead at the same time. Clearly, it requires considerable effort to maintain such delicate quantumness from fal...

In a recent article, Dr. Sutirth Dey from IISER Pune, along with researchers from JNCASR, Bangalore and IISER Mohali, have critically analysed the literature on the idea of niche construction (NC) in evolutionary biology and have questioned several claims of the proponents of NC. Niche constructi...

Air pollution with carbon dioxide from industrial processes can be tackled in one of these ways: capture the greenhouse gas prior to combustion (separate carbon dioxide mixed with H2 to facilitate clean coal technology); or capture it from the smoking chimneys of power plants (post-combustion) befor...

In their quest for better ways to harness solar energy, researchers from India and USA have now developed a phase-stable, all-inorganic quantum dot based solar cell and demonstrated its potential utility in opto-electronic devices. This is of great significance to the field of solar cell research wh...

Researchers at IISER Pune have developed new crystalline organic polymers that when used with electrocatalysts can tilt the kinetics favorably to split water and produce hydrogen and oxygen. Separating water into its constituent molecules requires one to overcome the forces holding the molecules ...

Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) are a special type of porous polymers made up of metal nodes linked to organic struts. As their numerous pores offer to house guest molecules, MOFs have found applications in gas storage, separation, and catalysis. Most commonly, MOFs are poor conductors of electri...

Ion transport across the cell membranes is facilitated by a certain class of membrane proteins known as ion channels and transporters. Concentration of ions within cells is prone to changes as the external environment varies. But cells have a built-in mechanism, called homeostasis, to maintain optim...

From social to neuronal, networks are omnipresent in our day-to-day lives. Networks such as transportation, power grids, web-pages, facebook, internet etc are complex systems built up of a collection of similar objects with an underlying pattern in their interactions or relations. "This is true for ...

IISER Pune researchers Dr. R. Vaidhyanathan and team have developed a new material that can selectively capture and remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from a gaseous mixture with hydrogen (H2). This can facilitate a more efficient purification of hydrogen, a known non-polluting fuel. The new material could...

[caption id="attachment_589" align="alignleft" width="300"] Mudumalai Tusker (Photo by Dr. Karpagam Chelliah)[/caption] The Asian elephant joins the ever-growing list of animals with sequenced genomes. Recent analyses throws light on the genetic bases of evolution in these intelligent, social ani...

The plasma membrane encloses and defines a cell, the basic unit that living organisms are made of. To facilitate cellular processes like transport of metabolites or signal transmission, the plasma membrane needs to pinch off parts of itself into the cell (endocytosis). This process of membrane fissi...

Like many other life forms, bacteria too are prone to viral infections. Many bacteria harbor restriction endonuclease enzymes, which help check the infection by selectively cutting and destroying the viral genomic DNA. The perpetual tussle between bacteria and viruses to gain an upper hand has resul...

Bacteria are known to thrive in an incredibly wide variety of habitats and conditions ranging from the human gut to hot springs. Scientists are trying to understand how bacteria manage to learn to survive in various conditions and thus to learn about the process of evolution itself. For this, resear...

As a new means to harness light energy, Dr. Musthafa’s research group at IISER Pune has developed a battery that can produce power from a light source. This development could potentially allow solar energy to be stored directly in a battery along with paving way to generate a sustainable photo batte...

IISER Pune recently hosted an event on Texts, Tunes, Technologies: Perspectives on Indian Musics. The two-day event that included a talk, a half-day symposium, and a workshop, received a good response from the IISER Pune community as well as music aficionados from the city. The proceedings opened w...