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.
A team of Indian scientists, working with collaborators from Singapore, Australia and France, have shown how clusters of circulating tumour cells—cancer cells that have sloughed off the tumour and are circulating in the blood—could help monitor the response to cancer treatments and predict a patient's survival chances using a simple blood test.
The monsoon is here; humming with the pouring rain are the croaks of frogs, for it is the season of love for most of them. But not for Micryletta aishani, the newest of the frogs discovered from the state of Assam. Unlike most frogs that breed during the monsoon, this elusive frog breeds before the onset of monsoon and then goes into hiding for the rest of the year. The discovery is the result of six years of extensive fieldwork in the northeastern states of India by a team of researchers from the University of Delhi, Wildlife Institute of India, Indonesian Institute of Sciences and the University of Texas at Arlington, USA.
In this digital age, ruled by smartphone apps, how about one to tell you how fresh your milk is? Although there are stringent safety rules concerning the quality of milk, almost 68% of what is available in the country does not conform to them. In a recent study, researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati have come up with a paper-based detection system to detect if a sample of milk is pasteurised and fresh. This technique, they say, is cost-effective, rapid, user- and environment-friendly.
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.
Researchers from the Nature Conservation Foundation, explored organisation of plants and fruit-eating bird communities of the Pakke Tiger Reserve in Arunachal Pradesh. They observed 43 plant species and 48 bird species in the region, and have identified the different networks formed between the trees and their avian seed dispersers.
