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An international study, led by researchers from the USA, which also included researchers from India, have designed a point-of-care testing approach for individuals suffering from TB. The study, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine and supported in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, proposes a rapid, cost-effective, and readily accessible triage test kit that can be used at the site of patient care.

As winter sets in over Punjab, one can hear the humdrum of hundreds of machines harvesting rice across lakhs of hectares of paddy fields. In Maharashtra, villages in Vidarbha lug their snowy cotton harvest to the market. Years ago, these landscapes were a sprawling array of forests, grasslands, wetlands and multiple crops cultivated on a shifting basis.

வலி என்பது உடலில் ஏற்படும் வேதனையளிக்கும் உணர்வு. நமது தினசரி அலுவல்களில் வலிகள் தவிர்க்க முடியாதவை. சிறு காயங்கள் மற்றும் விபத்துகளால் ஏற்படும்  வலிகளானது சில மணித்துளிகள் முதல் பல  நாட்கள் வரை  நீடிக்கக்கூடியவை. சிகிச்சைகளின் காலம் முடிந்தாலும், சில நேரங்களில் வலிகள் நாட்பட்ட வலிகளாக பல ஆண்டுகள் கூட நீடிப்பதுண்டு.

The impacts of climate change on coastal areas are severe than inland as they are vulnerable to flooding and extreme weather phenomena like cyclones, tornadoes etc. As the climate crisis deepens, a quarter of India's population, who live along the coasts, have another issue to worry about – availability of freshwater. Due to unchecked pumping of groundwater for daily use and rainfall variation, freshwater sources are being depleted. Besides, saltwater from the sea is unwittingly finding its way into local aquifers through a process called seawater intrusion. Although many independent studies, conducted at different locations, have observed depletion in freshwater sources along India's coasts, there is no comprehensive study yet. Now, researchers at Anna University, Chennai, have tried to address the extent of seawater intrusion in the Indian coastal regions in a study published in journal Environmental Science and Pollution Research. The study was funded by the National Centre for Earth Sciences Studies, Earth System Science Organisation, and the Ministry of Earth Sciences.

In a recent study, researchers from Pune's Agharkar Research Institute and Savitribai Phule University, and China's Zhejiang University have turned their attention towards Xyrids to gain a holistic understanding of the evolution of pipeworts.

Researchers from IIT Bombay propose cost-effective techniques of making microcontact printing stamps to print protein and grow cells.

How many bird calls can you recognise? Crows and pigeons, for sure! But have you ever come across an app that can recognise bird calls for you? With apps like eBird and India Biodiversity Portal, identifying and collecting data has become an activity that not just researchers can take part in. Rather, these technological advancements provide a push to scientific research as a whole! A mini-symposium was organised in IISER Mohali to discuss just that.

In a recent study, Dr Sachdev and an international team of researchers have shown that India’s mortality rate due to severe acute malnutrition is a fraction of the WHO estimates. This study is published in the journal PLOS Medicine.

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.

As Newton’s famous quote, “standing on the shoulders of giants”, this year, science has made considerable advances, building on many feats achieved in the past years. New discoveries, insights and inventions in the areas of astronomy, biology, medicine, paleontology and physics marked the year. Here is a selected pick of ten such breakthroughs in science witnessed in 2019.