Dr G V Pavan Kumar’s group at IISER Pune, in collaboration with researchers at Center for Nanoscale Materials, Argonne National Laboratory, USA, have experimentally shown for the first time, that Raman and fluorescence components of scattered light behave differently when confined to a plasmonic nan...

Researchers at IISER Pune have developed a covalent organic framework, a new porous material that can boost storage capacity of a Li-ion battery to nearly twice that of commercially available ones. Lithium-ion batteries are used in devices such as cell phones and laptops. They last long and are r...

Researchers at IISER Pune have developed a novel way to analyze heart dynamics that could potentially be used in the diagnosis of abnormalities of the heart. The analysis is based on the mathematical concept of fractals, which are repeating patterns that are similar at any scale. Fractals are...

Understanding cancer:  Role of DNA-dependent protein kinase in transformation of normal cells to cancer cells [caption id="attachment_1367" align="alignleft" width="230"] Cover page of the issue shows an example of intracellular trafficking, one of the phenomena found to be different between norm...

Improving TB Diagnostics through Synthetic Biology A team of seven undergraduates who competed in the “olympics” of synthetic biology, the international Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) contest, have won a silver medal at the GiantJamboree that took place from 9-13 November 2017 in Boston, ...

From home appliances to automobiles, cell phones to satellites, modern life is unthinkable without a source of energy. With non-renewable sources of energy, such as oil, gas, and coal, fast getting depleted, race is on to develop clean sustainable sources of energy and the technologies to harness th...

Following the announcement of endowment to IISER Pune from Balan group in May last year, the two organizations have now signed a formal agreement towards for construction of a building for for a science activity centre at IISER Pune. In a total of 60,000 sq ft of area, this building, “Smt. Indrani ...

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 ...