Early work on for safe replacement of plastics
Small steps point to a completely new science in dealing with the plastics problem.
Hari Pulakkat
Senior Editor, ETI have been a science and technology writer for over two decades. I had spent 18 years in the Businessworld magazine, sandwiched between two stints in The Economic Times. During these two decades, I have had the opportunity to write on several technology-based industries as well as R&D in national laboratories. I was also fortunate to have been able to spend four years in the Silicon Valley as the US correspondent of Businessworld. I have been always been interested in how technology gets developed and used, especially within the constraints of a developing country like India. With the exception of movies, I find everything in this world interesting. Apart from science, I love literature and music. And a good game of test cricket.Why moon matters for future interplanetary missions
Moon will likely be the base for future interplanetary missions. A presence there is of strategic importance.
Chandrayaan-2 Landing: How Isro's Vikram, Pragyan plan to make history tonight
Landing softly on the moon is a complex task. Only 37% of such attempts have been successful, but these statistics are deceptive.
As Earth warms up, South India to bear the maximum brunt
The earth is expected to warm up somewhere between 2.6 degree and 8.5 degree Celsius over the century.
India needs both informal and formal innovation to move higher in Innovation Index
Experts feel focus on economic growth stimulated by investments in R&D may help it move higher on GII ranking.
Pressure drop in rocket led Isro to abort moon mission
Isro had to abort Chandrayaan-2 due to drop in pressure in one of the tanks of the upper stage of the rocket.
Chandrayaan-2: India Inc’s lunar odyssey gets into mission mode
ISRO works with more than 400 companies in the country, with businesses ranging from under Rs 1 crore to Rs 200 crore a year.
How Chandrayaan 2 will add more teeth to ISRO's capabilities
Chandrayaan 2 will be testing some technologies for the first time, including mineral and water prospecting.
Companies have begun to improve the range & accuracy of weather forecasting
Roughly 60% of the operating expenses of a ship are in fuel costs, with a large ship burning 50 tonnes of oil per day.
How Azim Premji is rewriting the art of giving
Now, more of India Inc should be a catalyst for social development in India.
Why India is lagging in disruptive innovation
Infosys co-founder NR Narayana Murthy ruffled a few feathers in the academic community last week when he told students and faculty at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru that no invention, technology or...
Renewable energy will change the energy landscape as we know it
Close watchers of the global energy landscape would have noticed two stories in The New York Times this week. One was about the falling prices of renewable energy to the point of becoming cheaper than...
How unexplained anomalies are keeping scientists interested in low energy nuclear reactions
On November 6, the United States Patent Office published an application for a patent that made a disarming claim: that its inventor has a small reactor device that produces more heat than is put in,...
Human spaceflight: Long way from commercial launch
Accidents are common, but a rocket accident is a spectacularly eerie event, especially if a human is on board. One such accident took place last week, when a spaceship from Virgin Galactic blew up high...
Need New Biz Models For Affordable Drugs
The Ebola virus is a scary thing, as it kills 60-90% of the people it infects. This makes it the most dangerous virus in the world, along with its cousin Marburg virus. There are no...
Can batteries have a bigger place in our energy future?
Advances in battery technology have powered a new age of devices, but their lack of advance has also checked the progress of several other devices. Despite their considerable utility, batteries suffer from two major problems:...
Single-minded approach to problems
Measured by any yardstick, Shuji Nakamura is an extraordinary engineer. He shared this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics with two other Japanese scientists for inventing the blue LED, without which white LEDs are not possible....
In a warming world, paying attention to the monsoon
Early this week, British journal Nature published a paper on the Asian monsoon with a surprising discovery: the monsoon was active around 40 million years ago. This was at least 15 million years earlier than...
Sensible environmental policy and sound implementation will help India’s environment recover
The journal Nature has this week published a comment on how China must continue the momentum it has recently generated to protect its environment. Since the Chinese policy changes have received almost no attention in...
The Problem With Your Genetic Tests
Genetic testing can throw up red herrings Two days ago,The New York Times ran a story on genetic testing written by Keira Peikoff, supposedly a student of bioethics at Columbia University. She had done tests...
Here is a Sunrise Industry, Quite Literally
Instead of converting sunlight into electricity, why not use the sun to light up buildings? If you want to use the sun to light up buildings, why waste energy by first converting sunlight into electricity?...
Marking out our space on the final frontier
In the press conference that followed soon after the Mars orbiter launch, a foreign journalist asked what has now become a routine question: why should India send a mission to Mars when millions are in...
Peak waste: Another phenomenon that should bother us
Peak oil, defined as the time when oil production is less than the demand, is an idea that has fuelled many energy policies. Backers of the fossil fuel economy sometimes worry about peak oil, but...
After CV Raman, why Indian scientists didn’t get Nobel Prize
The week following Nobel Prizes is a good time to analyse Indian science. Specifically, it is a good time to ask yet again why an Indian hasn’t won — since CV Raman — a Nobel...
It’s Time to Go on a Low Carbon Diet
The carbon budget mentioned in the IPCC report will generate heated debate On Friday, Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change released a new report that tried to explain the physical basis...
The pollution cocktail isn’t good for you
Over the last decade, biological research has thrown up so many surprises that conventional medical wisdom is turned repeatedly on its head. One such instance happened last week, when the French National Institute of Health...
The Brain Gets Bigger in Big Cities
Emilie Snell-Rood , an evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota, last week published the results of a study that looked at the sizes of mammal brains — in 10 species of animals — over...
The Tesla CEO may transform the electric car industry forever
When you write the history of the automobile 100 years from now, Tesla CEO Elon Musk might be seen as one its greatest revolutionaries. Musk mixes his keen understanding of science and business — he...
The search is on for the perfect diet
Should you go vegan? Is fish good? Is red meat that bad? It’s not so simple Cleveland Clinic, consistently rated by many doctors as among the top hospitals in the world, published a paper in...
The India Bit in Quantum Computing
Isolating something, even a tiny atom, from all outside influences is a seemingly- impossible task. But some experimental physicists are hard at work trying to make these atoms obey their commands. You could sample it...
Are we prepared for total monsoon failure?
By the end of this week, the South West monsoon would have hit Indian shores. During a period of economic crisis, it would be one of the few welcome developments, although few people would look...
Online courses will change university business models
Three days ago, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed a non-profit partnership, called edX, to offer free online courses. MIT had been putting videos of entire courses online for some time,...
Rethinking collaboration
At long last, after several decades of obsession with teamwork and collaboration, scientific and public attention is turning the other way. A series of books, research papers and essays in leading publications now talk about...
Bureaucratic control of science will wear away
It is not often that you see a top government official criticising the government. Yet this was precisely what the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) secretary M.K.Bhan did at the Bangalore Bio yesterday, although he couched...
Indian R&D needs private sector investment
Indian science had shown great promise in the first half of the twentieth century. C V Raman had won the Nobel Prize, and India had produced other equally eminent scientists like S N Bose, Meghnad...
