In an announcement made yesterday, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has published a list of the recipients of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for 2019. The list includes twelve eminent scientists from various research institutions across the country, with only one woman scientist from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.

Researchers from Bose Institute, Kolkata, investigated the effect of air circulation and the varying climatic conditions on the mustard aphids that migrate across the Indo-Gangetic Plains in Northern India. The authors traced the pests’ exact origin by studying the backward courses of air movement along known migratory routes.

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, have developed a biomolecule-based fertiliser that can help address the drawbacks of chemical fertilisers. 

Study by researchers from the CUH, JNU, New Delhi, and NBSS & LUP, New Delhi, provides more evidence on the groundwater contamination in the Upper Gangetic basin.

A team of Irish and Indian biologists from the University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland, the Natural History Museum (NHM), UK, and the University of Delhi (DU), India, have provided detailed descriptions of these newly discovered frogs.

Researchers from NCBI, RRI, University of Barcelona, CSIR - Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine, CNCI, and University of Queensland tried to understand how cells maintain their shapes in spite of expelling material from their membrane.

Researchers from IISc, NCBS, ICTS, India, and Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, have successfully developed a model to explain the dynamics of collective systems that are motile at high density.

“When you're curious, you find lots of interesting things to do”, said Walt Disney. And, one such thing Dr Anindita Bhadra, now an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata (IISER Kolkata), did during her later PhD days was to curiously analyse huge amounts of observational data on small colonies of paper wasps (Ropalidia marginata).

Research from IISc finds a vital link between immune system disorders and psychological conditions like OCD

In a recent announcement, Dr Shekhar C. Mande, the current Director of the National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS), Pune has been appointed as the new Director General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), India. He succeeds Dr Girish Sahni, who retired on 31st August 2018. CSIR is one of the world’s largest publicly-funded research and development organisations and is known for its contributions in diverse areas of science.