Young guns: future stars of Indian science

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The National Academy of Sciences in India (NASI) and Elsevier, an international publishing firm for scientific literature, have for the past five years, handpicked and honoured outstanding young Indian scientists. This year, eight scientists won the NASI-SCOPUS Award. They get a plaque and Rs 50,000 in cash. What they also get is the attention and respect of their scientific peers. Many former NASI-SCOPUS winners have gone on to wrest greater accolades - so this in a sense, is a sign of bigger things to come. Here's a quick look at some of this year's awardees. And the work that makes special. Biological Science: Sanjib Senapati (IIT Madras) The next time you play a video game, think of Dr Sanjib Senapati. While you slay dragons, wallop huge sixers or race cars on your PC, he'll be playing a complex game of his own. A game that one....

UID, NPR and all that Jazz

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Some three months ago, my wife, her sister and their parents drove seven odd kilometers from where we live, to register for a Universal Identity or UID number. They've all got one now. Strangely, my wife got it about a month after the rest of the family did, even though they'd all enrolled together. I was working that day, so about a month later, I hopped across to an apartment complex just ten minutes from our place, where I'd heard there was a UID camp in progress. I stood in line for maybe half an hour, then got myself photographed, fingerprinted and my iris scanned. Curiously, the young lady who took all those records, couldn't even type properly. She'd pound the keyboard with one finger - I remember wondering if she was determined to destroy it. As if in revenge, the computer refused to accept my full address.....

YouTube, school kids and the International Space Station

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Wonder if you knew about this. YouTube's been running a contest called SPACELAB. Fourteen to eighteen year olds from around the world were asked to dream up an experiment they'd like to see carried out in space. They needed to make a short video explaining what they wanted done, how they'd do it and what results they expected to get from the experiment. YouTube would have the best two experiments actually done. On the International Space Station, two hundred and fifty miles above earth. And streamed live around the world. Not bad huh? Seems eighty countries participated and Indians sent the maximum entries - forty per cent! Sixty experiments survived an initial elimination and there are nine Indian entries on that list. What happens now is an online vote - netizens pick the best two from these sixty. You can watch all the entries on www.youtube.com/spacelab. The....

Antrix-Devas row: Dr Madhavan Nair guilty?

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Was Dr Madhavan Nair guilty of any wrongdoing? I'm neither informed nor qualified enough to comment on that. But should a man who took India to the moon be summarily flicked off and publicly humiliated? Without even a chance to clear his stand? Perhaps the PMO needs a better human resources manager? It's happened with the Army Chief's age row earlier. And now with the ex-chief of the Indian Space Research Organisation. They both do have some explaining to do. But belittling them doesn't damage just their own dignity. It also grieviously hurts the people they've trained, the institutions they've nurtured. I got to reading up on the Devas controversy and here's what I could piece together. Q) What is the brouhaha all about? A) Madhavan Nair and three other ex-ISRO scientists have been blacklisted by the government. They'll never again be allowed to....

Reflections on the 63rd Republic Day

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This December, Jeremy Clarkson of the BBC, flashed an India special edition of his famous motoring show Top Gear. He drove around a Jaguar sports car in our slums. Attached to the boot was an open air toilet. Showing off the car's unusual modification as he drove around the slums, Clarkson boasted: "This is perfect for India because everyone who comes here gets the trots." (A reference perhaps to an upset stomach.) There were a lot of other very offensive stunts he pulled off on the show. Offensive enough to make the Indian High commissioner to Britain angrily demand that the BBC pull the show off air. They refused to do so and refused to apologise. When the story was first reported a week back, I thought - don't we have better things to do? Why link our national prestige to a mere television anchor and his....

A visit to the Mclaren F1 Paddocks

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"Seen Neo in the Matrix? Well, just like Neo is surrounded by all those numbers in the movie trailer, I'm surrounded by numbers - telemetry data. Every second of the race, sensors on my car are pumping out data about its performance to computers. When I get back into the paddock - I can see what I did wrong, where I braked too early or too late, where I should have pushed harder." Lewis Hamilton definitely knows how to turn a sound-bite. Better still, he knows how to be a really nice person. Fresh out of a grueling one and a half hour practice session on the Budh International circuit - he patiently took us journos, a bunch of F1 newbies, through the finer points of the art of formula racing. There's no drama, no starry airs, no impatience. Just a wonderfully down to earth man chatting about something....

Giving Indian scientists a platform to showcase their work

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Like in practically everything else, the Chinese beat us hollow when it comes to publishing their scientific research in international journals like Science, Nature and Lancet. Indian scientists often publish in local journals. While such publications are respected within the country, many are simply ignored abroad. Which means even if an Indian finds a slightly better way of doing an experiment or stumbles upon interesting results that could some day unlock a new technology - foreigners might never hear of it. That's one problem. Now, try on a very different hat. Imagine you are a government administrator, a very rich philanthropist, or even a foreign venture capital fund. Let's say you want to encourage and fund research in India. But you don't want to throw your money away. You want to pick sectors where our scientists already have an interesting body of work. With the right backing,....

A Facebook for Labcoats

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Imagine a Facebook for scientists...A place where chemists, physicists, biologists, pharmaceutical experts all hang out. Where they upload notes, photos and detailed simulations from their latest research and invite their peers to comment and suggest improvements. Interestingly, such a site exists. (Check it out at http://sysborg2.osdd.net but be sure to create your own username and password before your do). More interestingly, it's been set up and funded by the Indian government. Somehow, the babus we think of as staid and old fashioned believe it's just the thing we need to make a breakthrough in the pharma industry. The logic's pretty straightforward. Perfecting new medicines is an expensive, time-consuming job. It's usually done by obscenely rich multi-national corporations, in multi-billion dollar laboratories. Small teams of scientists spend years in fortified research facilities, jealously guarding their research from the rest of the world. When they....

Computers that talk to you

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Imagine a long day at work. You have a blazing headache. You desperately need to give your eyes some rest but still have a host of emails to go through. Wouldn't it be nice if your PC could just read them out? Or say you're in the backseat of a car, bumping and weaving through traffic. You have time on your hands, you'd like to catch up on news from your favourite Website, or look up the latest on facebook and twitter. But staring at a jumping, twitching screen makes you nauseous. Be cool if your laptop could just read stuff off the Web eh? Interestingly, your PC can probably already do some of that, if you fine-tune the accessibility settings on its operating system. There are free screen reader add-ons for internet browsers like Firefox, which allow them to read off the Web too. But imagine....

FARO: The science of measurement

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This is rather late in the day. But about two months back, I saw something I haven't been able to forget completely. It's a small rectangular gizmo mounted on a tripod. And it creates a three-dimensional, high-resolution image of any room it's placed in. Not a digital photograph, mind you but a panoramic digital image that records the precise distance from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling, from chair to table, from pencil to paper, from desktop to window. What's it good for? Well, one unusual application the makers suggested was police work. Put the gizmo to work at an encounter site - and it records everything, the size and position of the bullet holes, the angle at which the bodies lie, the exact co-ordinates and alignment of the abandoned weapons - everything. It makes reconstructing events like the Ishrat Jehan encounter or say the Arushi....