The Bigger Picture

Indiabioscience website launches
Saturday, January 30th, 2010

IndiaBioscience.org, a web site designed to serve as a central portal of information on Indian biosciences, was recently launched. It will provide a means of fostering communication and building a community of Indian biologists - young and old, within India and internationally.

Jayant Narlikar's Cosmology
Vinodh Ilangovan
K. Manish Sharma
P. Chitra
Saturday, January 16th, 2010

“According to the big bang theory the universe is only 13 billion years old. ... We made some observations a year ago which we are still trying to explain but the simplest explanation seems to be that there stars that are 20 billion years old.” (Jayant Narlikar).  Does the universe have a beginning? Was life on earth seeded from outer space? Dr. Jayant Narlikar visited NCBS recently and the Centre's news team was there to ask his opinions on questions that humans have pondered since time immemorial.

New ICAM node in India
Geoff Hyde
Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

NCBS recently became a new research node for the  Institute for Complex Adaptive matter (ICAM), an international organisation with over sixty institutional members. The vision of ICAM is highly inter-disciplinary with its researchers involved in the areas of correlated electronic materials, soft condensed matter, and biological matter. The concept that draws scientists from such divergent fields together is that all complex entities, biological and non-biological, exhibit some common principles of organization. By understanding how these “emergent properties” operate in one system, we may gain insights into the workings of other unrelated systems.

Bangalore design students dazzle at MIT synthetic biology competition
Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

A team of students from Bangalore’s Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology were judged to have made the “Best Presentation” at the prestigious International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) Competition, held on Monday, November 2nd at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At iGEM, undergraduate teams from around the world compete to build innovative genetic devices in living cells, applying synthetic biology to solve problems in areas such as environment, energy, health, and foundational research.

"Three city science institutes get US pat"
GN Prashanth
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
From: The Times of India, Bangalore, 10 June 2009

BANGALORE: Bangalore’s pre-eminence as the country’s science capital just received further endorsement.The US-based National Science Foundation (NSF) has ranked the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) as the number one centre in India for US graduate students to take up research fellowships and short-term programmes. Two other Bangalore institutions — the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute for Information Technology — are among the top eight destinations for science research.