In a recent study, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, and Christian Medical College, Vellore, have developed a novel, inexpensive and easy-to-use device to detect tuberculosis.

A ventilator can be a life-saver for patients whose lungs are damaged by the COVID-19 infection. But India, like all countries grappling with this pandemic, is likely to face a large shortage of ventilators. Manufacturers are unable to source key components such as sensors and flow controllers from abroad due to the current disruptions in global supply chains.To address this shortage, a team of engineers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) is currently building a prototype of an electro-mechanical ventilator from scratch, using only components found or made in India, based on guidelines issued by the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. It is expected to be ready within the next couple of weeks.

Nature is an enigma; an ensemble of complex structures and functions come together to form a variety of mesmerising artefacts, including life. Richard Feynman, the well-known American Nobel Laureate and physicist, famously said—"Nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it's a wonderful problem, because it doesn't look so easy".

Understanding patterns in nature has been of interest to researchers. Some of the popular questions have been around why birds flock together, how groups of bees build their honeycombs out of perfect hexagons, how ants navigate finding the shortest path back to the nest, and the likes. Researchers across the world are trying to decipher and explain how and why such specific patterns emerge.

About five earthquakes of magnitude 5.0 or higher on the Ritcher scale occur on our planet every day. Researchers from the IISc, Bengaluru, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia, and BARC, Mumbai, have reported a method to better identify building sites with soil that could be susceptible to damage from earthquakes.

We all remember learning to read—at first, we were taught to read each letter or sound at a time laboriously. Eventually, we picked up reading entire words and sentences effortlessly. But, it is not yet clear as to what changes in our brain when we learn to read. In a recent study, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, have identified these changes in the brain changes that help in visually processing the words and helps us to read efficiently. The study was published in the journal Psychological Science and was funded by the Department of Biotechnology-Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Partnership Programme and the Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance.

Researchers from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune; and Florida State University, USA; have mathematically computed a multidecadal variability in the Indian summer monsoon rainfall and the global sea surface temperature. They have established that Indian monsoon rainfall exhibits a 67-year oscillation and is closely linked to the sea surface temperature cycle, which also shows a similar 67-year swing. The study also shows that 80% of all droughts have occurred in the rainfall cycle’s ‘negative phase’, associated with a below-average rainfall; whereas 60% of all floods have occurred in the positive phase, marked with above-average precipitation. Their findings have been published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society.

Several interacting molecular and biochemical processes are vital to establishing cell polarity. In a recent study, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, studied some of these signals in the centrosome—an organelle in the cell responsible for cellular organisation—of a single-cell embryo.

Graphene, a sheet-like form of carbon, has been hailed as a wonder material owing to its many promising applications in electronics, drug delivery and more. In a recent study, a team of scientists from India and the USA, led by Prof Srinivasan Raghavan and Prof Rudra Pratap from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, has paved the way for new applications of graphene by intentionally varying the defects formed during its production.

Our genetic material is a big molecule of DNA or deoxyribonucleic acid, whose structure is a double-stranded wound-up helix. It contains specific instructions that run a living cell, and these instructions are written on the strands. When cells divide, the DNA replicates too. In this process, the contents of the strands are read and copied carefully by unwinding the strands. But that's not as simple!