Among all the calamities caused by climate change, an increase in the salinity of the soil is one. It is projected that, by 2050, about half of today’s arable land across the world will be affected by salinity. This increase would also hit India’s rice bowl, the Indo-Gangetic plains, which is projected to lose about 45% of the crop yield. When salinity increases, plants respond by absorbing less water, which affects their growth. How then do we help agriculturally vital crops cope with high salinity?

Researchers show that the shape of dried paint or ink deposit is related to the concentration and size of particles in these colloids.

Ever wondered why we use only specific inks for the inkjet printer? Why not any random dye? The wrong ink may result in non-uniform and patchy printing. Printing inks are colloids—tiny solid particles suspended in a liquid. The size and the concentration of the solid particles in ink specified for printers are designed to deposit uniformly on paper.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) approaches are the present-day buzzwords finding applications in a host of domains affecting our lives. These approaches use known datasets to train and build models that can predict, or sometimes, make decisions about a task. In one such case, researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay), Mumbai, have in a recent study, developed ML approaches using molecular descriptors for certain types of catalysis that could find use in several therapeutic applications.

While looking forward to 2020, the editorial team at Research Matters looks back on some of the interesting stories that we published during 2019. There were many interesting ones ranging from the first photograph of a black hole to air pollution in Delhi to using vibrations for painless injections. Here is a list to highlight India's year in science during 2019. This is in no way ranked and the order is just incidental.