Research

Tamarind seeds and cotton waste may soon be used to make low-cost supercapacitors for energy storage – thanks to the efforts of a group of Indian scientists who have used such waste biomass to develop materials for making cost-effective supercapacitor devices. This can pave the way towards affordable electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles which bank on supercapacitors significantly for their application in braking systems and start-stop cycles.

Scientists from Agharkar Research Institute (ARI), Pune, an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Govt. of India, have come up with the first synthetic route for producing flavonoids molecules related to the treatment of tuberculosis and chikungunya. Preliminary indications have been witnessed regarding probable treatment response to COVID 19.

Dr. Saurabh Kumar from Centre for Nanoscience and Engineering (CeNSE) at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, a recipient of the INSPIRE Faculty Fellowship instituted by the Department of Science & Technology, Govt. of India is currently working on wearable sensors that can retract information from human body using its largest organ, the skin.

Babu ChunderSikur Chatterjee, an Indian scientist employed with the Surveyor General of India during the British colonial era, was likely the first person to scientifically document a tornado’s path in 1865, claims a study from the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune. By carefully searching and analysing papers about tornados, Saumyendu De and Dr A K Sahai, scientists at IITM Pune, concluded that Chatterjee’s paper is the earliest record of a tornado’s dynamics in the history of meteorology.

Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union Minister of Law & Justice, Communications and Electronics & Information Technology, launched today “Swadeshi Microprocessor Challenge- Innovate Solutionsfor #Aatmanirbhar Bharat” to provide further impetus to the strong ecosystem of Start-up, innovation and research in the country.

Bannerghatta Biological Park, Bengaluru on Saturday announced the birth of baby Hippopotamus in Bannerghatta Zoo on July 24.
BBP executive director Vanashri Vipin Singh said that the baby Hippopotamus and its mother ‘Dashya’ aged around 11 years are healthy and doing well.

H G Wells’ ‘Invisible Man’ tweaked optical properties of the body to become invisible. Scientists have now achieved a similar feat by designing a metal mesh structure instead of continuous film on desired transparent substrates to make it a transparent shield for electromagnetic interference (EMI). The invisible shield can be used in various military stealth applications and can cover electromagnetic wave emitter or absorber devices without compromising their aesthetics.

Globular clusters are the stellar systems with millions of stars formed from the same gaseous cloud. Hence, usually, the stars formed will be homogeneous in their chemical composition of elemental abundances. But, there are clusters which deviate from this norm. One is being Omega Centauri, the brightest and the largest globular cluster in our Galaxy, the Milky Way.

Magnetic hyperthermia-mediated cancer therapy (MHCT), a non-invasive cancer treatment technique involves the delivery and localisation of magnetic materials within the targeted tumour site followed by subsequent application of an alternating magnetic field (AMF), thereby generating heat at the tumour site.

With the support from Department of Science and Technology’s Clean Air Research Initiative, Prof. Rao Tatavarti, Director of Gayatri Vidya Parishad-Scientific and Industrial Research Centre (GVP-SIRC) & GVP College of Engineering, Visakhapatnam, has developed an indigenous photonic system for real-time remote monitoring of air quality parameters.