Today is National Science Day—a day to celebrate the spirit of science and scientific temper across the county. It is a day to commemorate Sir C V Raman’s discovery of the Raman effect. This year, the theme of National Science Day is ‘Women in Science’, celebrating the contributions of women scientists to the field of science in India.

Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) suggest that better conductivity of oil may help water droplets come together. Their findings may impact the design of electric field-based oil dehydrators.

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar,  Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, and the University of Southampton, UK have tried to understand the effects of changes in land use and land cover on regional temperatures in Odisha, which frequently experiences heatwave, cyclones, droughts and floods.

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 from the IIITD, CSIR-IMT and DU designed NeuroPIpred, a web-based tool that uses machine learning techniques to craft insect-specific pesticides.

All the electronic devices that we use today have components made of semiconductors, mostly silicon. In recent years, gallium nitride, another semiconductor, is making its way into electronics. It is better suited for high power and high-frequency applications. Researchers from IISc have developed India’s first-ever e-mode gallium nitride power transistor, whose performance is comparable to some of the best reports till date.

Two Russian institutes—A.N.Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution and Moscow State Agricultural University, and the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, India, have compared the chemical contents of the faecal matter of the Amur and Bengal tigers to examine the stress levels of these tigers in India and Russia.

The forests of the Western Ghats, a biodiversity hotspot of India, have been revealing several new species of amphibians and reptiles in the recent years. This time, however, amphibian researchers from the University of Delhi have discovered a new frog species which was hiding in plain sight in a roadside puddle in Southern India.

Tiny RNA lost during domestication created robust rice varieties, shows study by NCBS, Bengaluru. 

Researchers from IIT Kanpur, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, USA, University of Hyderabad, and IIT Delhi have tried to understand how aerosols affect the Indian monsoon season.