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What can your rooftop solar do for you; do for your country? In a one-day workshop held on the 11th of January at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore, in collaboration with the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, scientists and practitioners brainstormed to discuss the challenges in setting up rooftop solar systems and solutions for the same. Prof. Baldev Raj, Director, NIAS gave the inaugural address, and Shri R.N. Nayak, Ex-CMD, Power Grid, delivered the keynote speech highlighting the policy, regulatory, socio-economic, and technical issues involving rooftop solar. The workshop saw participation from Solar Energy Corporation of India, BESCOM, Power Company of Karnataka Ltd., IIT-Mumbai, Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Syndicate Bank, Thermax, Renew Power, New India Solar, Prayas, and other representatives from academia and industry.

In the movie “Terminator: The Rise of Machines”, the character Terminatrix manipulates the Cyborgs tweaking them to work against humans and to her own advantage. Now, scientists have discovered that some strains of bacteria could do the same to some of our cells. Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, is one such. It manipulates the macrophages, a type of white blood cell that hunts and engulfs invading pathogens, to act as bacterial reservoirs and provide a survival niche. This niche not only provides the bacteria with nutrients, but also helps evade the normal immune response. In a recent study, a team of scientists from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, has explored the mechanism behind the manipulation of macrophages by this bacteria.

One of the major scientific discoveries in the recent past has been the direct detection of gravitational waves, predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity about a century ago, by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2016. The detection of short duration gravitational waves sent out during the cataclysmic merger of two black holes in a faraway galaxy, has stirred up considerable excitement as scientists expect more detection events from varied sources with advancements in detectors. A team of Indian astrophysicists led by Sushan Konar from the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA), Pune, have now proposed a special class of neutron stars as candidates for targeted search for continuous gravitational waves with the next generation of instruments.

‘We are all made of stardust’ goes the common saying. The phrase is more than just rhetoric; it alludes to the formation of atoms and molecules in the universe. Most atoms and a few molecules around us were mostly formed in the bowels of exploding stars, which then went on to form planets, oceans, living organisms and everything in between. Now, a collaborative study by Raman Research Institute (RRI), Bangalore, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore and P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute, Moscow, is studying the processes that may have led to the formation of these molecules from the debris of the exploding stars.

When bacteria or viruses enter our body, our immune system attacks these invaders through its first line of defense – inflammation – and helps us eject them. The inflammation generally dies down soon after. However, sometimes, our body can experience a long lasting immune response leading to chronic conditions such as osteoarthritis and fibrosis. This response, occurring in the absence of a bacterial or viral infection, is called a ‘sterile inflammation’. What causes such inflammations and how do we treat them? In a recent study, Dr. Srikala Raghavan and her team at the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine (inStem), Bangalore, try to answer these intriguing questions.

The Nobel Prize Series India 2017, in the last leg of its program, witnessed Nobel Laureates Prof. David Gross and Prof. Randy Schekman actively engage in a Q&A session at ITC Gardenia this morning. After attending the grand inauguration of the Nobel Exhibition by the Hon’ble Prime Minister Narendra Modi, at Science City, Ahmedabad on 9th January, the visiting laureates engaged in the Nobel Dialogue, held as a part of Vibrant Gujarat Summit at Mahatma Mandir in Gandhinagar.

Ribosomes are molecular machines that make proteins in cells. That the ribosomes are important can be judged by the fact that the cells spend about 40% of their energy in assembling them. In bacteria, ribosomes are made up of a large (50S) and a small (30S) subunits. Flaws in the assembly and maturation (biogenesis) of any of these subunits affect protein synthesis in various ways and often result in the organism’s intolerance to cold, and impact their resistance to drugs and pathogenity. In higher organisms (including humans), defective biogenesis of ribosomes could lead to various diseases. Hence, an understanding of how cells manage accuracy in the complex process of ribosome biogenesis is of utmost importance in developing therapeutic interventions. Now, a study from the laboratory of Prof. Umesh Varshney at the Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, has unravelled the mechanism behind synthesis of ribosomes.

Science has established that the father’s sperm, which fertilizes the mother’s ovum resulting in the formation of an embryo, decides the sex of an individual. So it’s only logical that if the ‘male factor’ of the sperm/ovum relationship is damaged, the product will be too. Now, a recent collaborative study by a team of researchers led by Prof. Hanudatta Atreya of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and Prof. Satish Kumar Adiga of Kasturba Medical College, Manipal, has found that if the sperm, set to fertilize a particular ovum, has damaged DNA, it affects the metabolism of the embryo that it fathers. The study was conducted using samples of sperm and ova from couples undergoing Intra-Cytoplamic Sperm Injection (ICSI), a popular technique to help infertile couples conceive.

Black coloured rooftops have become the norm of many of the cities’ landscape with increasing number of houses switching over to sustainable, efficient and clean energy source – solar energy. Solar-thermal power systems that convert solar energy to heat or electricity are becoming ubiquitous. These systems typically consist of a flat plate collector that utilizes solar absorber coatings to get maximum conversion efficiency from incident solar radiation to heat. These collectors are coated black to enhance the absorptance- the effectiveness of absorbing radiant energy. Now, a group of researchers, led by Prof. Bikramjit Basu from the Material Research Centre at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and Dr. Harish C Barshilia from CSIR-National Aerospace Laboratories, has developed a new, colourful coating for flat plate collectors, thereby increasing its absorptance without compromising the aesthetic appearance of the roofs where they are installed.

The Internet is a bottomless mine of information in various forms – text, videos and images. Organizing this information for easy search and retrieval is very beneficial to internet users, and poses challenges to computer scientists. While lot of research progress has been made about categorizing textual data, the same cannot be said about images and videos. A group of researchers at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, has been attempting to make video search on the Internet user-friendly. In a recent paper, Prof. Chiranjib Bhattacharyya and a Ph.D. scholar Dr. Adway Mitra, at the Department of Computer Science and Automation (CSA), and Prof. Soma Biswas from the Department of Electrical Engineering, have presented techniques to this end.