Research

A team of researchers from IIT Mandi, led by Dr Prosenjit Mondal, Associate Professor, School of Basic Sciences, has used complementary experimental approaches to establish the underlying biochemical relationship between the consumption of excessive sugar and the development of ‘fatty liver’, medically known as Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD). This research comes at a time in which the Government of India has included NAFLD in the National Programme for Prevention & Control of Cancer, Diabetes, Cardiovascular Diseases and Stroke (NPCDCS).

In one of its initiatives to encourage the manufacturing industry in India, CSIR-Central Scientific Instruments Organisation (CSIO) had developed and transferred the technology of “Precision Iodine Value Analyzer (PIVA)”, an instrument for the measurement of the degree of unsaturation (Iodine Value) in vegetable oils. This indigenous food testing equipment – PIVA was recognized by FSSAI during World Food Safety Day.

Research by a team has offered a solution for improving the image quality without heavy computations. The team from the Raman Research Institute (RRI), Bengaluru, an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology; Space Applications Centre, Indian Space Research Organisation, Ahmedabad; Shiv Nadar University, Gautam Buddha Nagar; and Université Rennes and Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, France, modulated the light source and demodulated them at the observer’s end to achieve sharper images. The research was published in the journal ‘OSA Continuum’.

Scientists’ teams from the Departments of Physics (led by Dr. Rajesh Kumar) and Biosciences and Biomedical Engineering (Dr. Hem Chandra Jha) at IIT Indore along with their collaborator, Dr. Fouzia Siraj, at National Institute of Pathology (ICMR), New Delhi, used Raman Spectroscopy System supported by “Fund For Improvement of S&T Infrastructure (FIST)” scheme of Department of Science and Technology to trace the propagation mechanism of the virus. Research scholars Ms. Deeksha Tiwari, Ms. Shweta Jakhmola, and Mr. Devesh Pathak also contributed to this study published recently in the journal ‘ACS Omega’.

The technology developed byDr Chiranjib Bhattacharjee, Professor at the Chemical Engineering Department in Jadavpur University, Kolkata, uses a combination of Electrocoagulation and Electroflotation Enhanced Membrane Module (ECEFMM) techniques for waste water treatment.

Scientists from Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology (WIHG), an autonomous institute under the Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India, and scientists from Norway and Switzerland used high-resolution 3D seismic data to unravel geomorphology of recurrent cases of movement of soil, sand, regolith, and rock downslope like a solid in Taranaki basin off New Zealand. This is technically called mass wasting of sediments. The study led by Prof. Kalachand Sain was published in the journal ‘Basin Research’.

In a major boost to the scientific efforts for crop improvement to save nitrogenous pollution and fertilizers worth billions, Indian biotechnologists identified candidate genes for nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) in rice. This was accomplished by Prof. Nandula Raghuram, Dr. Supriya Kumari and Dr. Narendra Sharma from the School of Biotechnology, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, New Delhi.

A team of Scientists including Jiya Albert, Bishnupriya Sahoo, and Prasad K. Bhaskaran from IIT Kharagpur, with support from the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India under the Climate Change Programme (CCP), devised a novel method using Eddy detection technique to investigate the formative stages and advance detection time of tropical cyclogenesis in the North Indian Ocean region. The research was published in the journal ‘Atmospheric Research’ recently.