#WIISER Spotlight | Dr. Megha Vagadia: On a roller coaster ride of innovating and aiding technological advancements

Debdatta Banerjee and Arunita Banerjee

Dr. Megha Vagadia is an experimental condensed matter physicist and material scientist at IISER Bhopal. In this electronic interview, she talks about her exciting field of research, her views on balancing gender ratios in academia and interesting alternate career options outside academia.

Celebrating Marie Tharp: The Queen of the Oceans!

Apeksha Srivastava and Aniruddha Mukherjee

July 30, 2020, marked the 100th birth anniversary of the very inspirational Marie Tharp, the woman who 'decoded' the oceans. While several other scientists remain at the forefront of academic media, not many people know about the woman who showed us, for the first time, that the ocean bottom has a range of geographical features, similar to what we see on land. Before the early 1950s, the world knew very little about the ocean floor structure. It was her revolutionary work that not only opened doors to previously unknown and amazing terrain of the ocean floor, but also made it possible for us to understand our planet better. Marie Tharp was one of the creators of the first detailed map of the Atlantic Ocean floor, and she definitely did not stop just there.

Genes vs Proteins: A perspective from brain tumor research

Aniruddha Mukherjee

The plethora of molecules inside a cell is highly regulated in terms of their abundance and functions. The regulation happens in layers which are, again, most fundamentally attributed to the expression of genes and proteins. The present article enlightens us on how a large-scale the study of proteins and genes in one of the deadliest tumors reveals layer-specific association of molecules with the time of survival of patients.

Sweet smell of plague - A step towards preventing locust swarms

Anandarup Bhadra

In 2020, western and central India saw the sky blackened by millions of desert locusts (Schistocerca gregaria), a haunting image out of the Biblical plagues. These swarms can be upto a few kilometers long and can wipe out several fields of crops in a single day. They are a threat to the food and livelihood of millions of people[1]. Recently, Xiaojiao Guo and her colleagues made some crucial discoveries in understanding how locusts aggregate, as reported in a study in Nature, “4-vinylanisole is an aggregation pheromone in locusts”[2]. This may provide better strategies to deal with locust swarms, a crisis that revisits us once every few decades.

Mapping the Milky Way

Divyansh Dewan

This article briefly explains how the structure of the milky way galaxy was found and what physical processes and observational techniques enable us to calculate distances and speeds at an astronomical scale.

Love thy neighbor: Can humans and animals live next to each other in peace

Anish Paul

People have been sharing spaces with large mammals like elephants and leopards for eternity in northern West Bengal. But over the last few decades, this region has been reporting one of the highest human-wildlife negative interactions globally. A group of scientists are trying to find how the coexistence of human and wildlife can be promoted in this pristine yet modified landscape.