You asked it and here we have! Wondering what was popular on Research Matters in 2018? Following are our top-ten stories that gained traction by readers like you. Thank you for your support and hope to see it continue in the years to come.

As the curtain falls on 2018, here is a tribute to those great Indian scientists and innovators who died in the year. These eminent people contributed to various fields of science and helped put India in the frontiers of global scientific advancements. This is in no way an exhaustive list, but it is an effort to bring to the fore the achievers who have left an indelible mark behind. 

Astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” Little did we know that this “something”, for the field of tissue engineering, would be a little spinach leaf!

IIT Bombay student has won the Gandhian Young Technological Innovation (GYTI) Award for window-mounted solar cooker design

IIT Bombay student develops a device to locate veins before drawing blood.

For many of us, the thought of being pricked by a needle to draw blood or inject drugs is horrifying, right? What if you had to be pierced many times because the right vein could not be identified? Nightmarish you say? Soon, this could be the thing of past, thanks to an award-winning ‘vein tracer’ by Mr. Trivikram Annamali, a student of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

Researchers from IIT Bombay use simulations to predict future shoreline changes in Paradip Port of Odisha, India.

Imagine streaming a movie through your tube light or accessing the Internet through a street lamp. Light Fidelity (Li-Fi), a new communication system developed by Professor Harald Hass, can actually achieve this!

After graphene, carbon nanocones are now an exciting form of carbon for material scientists. As the name suggests, they are conical structures made up of carbon, where graphene sheets are folded like a party cap with a height and diameter of a few nanometers (1 nanometer = 1/1,000,000,000th of a metre). With unique properties due to their conical shape, they have a wide range of applications, including being used as a tip of the probe of a high precision microscope used to record activity at an atomic level.

In a recent study, a team of researchers from Purdue University, USA, Northrop Grumman, USA, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India, and University of Florida, USA have studied the effect of using computer-aided design (CAD) simulations on teaching engineering design thinking to students.

A team of researchers from Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, Université Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France and Technische Universität München, Germany has provided a material design strategy for polycrystalline piezoelectrics that could achieve electrostrain values larger than 1%. The breakthrough could result in cheaper and efficient piezoelectric actuators.