We all remember the early days when the news of the COVID-19 pandemic was being discussed over chai. Months have passed since the pandemic has turned into a worldwide crisis bringing daily routines to a grinding and extended halt.  In a country that numbers over a billion, the second most populated nation of the world, India was standing at a precipice, staring down at an unimaginable healthcare crisis fearing morbidity and mortality. Then came the lockdown and the slow ticking of the numbers on the ever-climbing graph of COVID-19 cases.

"It is a germicidal coating which has shown resistance to the virus by neutralising bacteria or viruses when applied on fabrics. It neutralises anything that has a membrane, and all bacteria and a large number of viruses have membranes," said Prof Satyajit Mayor, Director at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) told CNN-News18.

At last, Salazar Slytherin has a snake named after him. A stunningly beautiful green pit viper with an “orange to reddish stripe running from the lower border of the eye” to the tip of its tail. The Salazar Pit Viper (Trimeresurus salazar) was found in the lowlands of western Arunachal Pradesh by Zeeshan A. Mirza, Harshal S. Bhosale, Pushkar U. Phansalkar, Mandar Sawant, Gaurang G. Gowande and Harshil Patel.

Dr. Manu Prakash, renowned for his frugal science approach, was the speaker of the third WebGyan session, on ‘From Volcanoes to bicycles: Roles and responsibilities for inventing in crisis mode’.

PTI, MAY 18 2020, 15:56 ISTUPDATED: MAY 18 2020, 17:00 IST The Azim Premji Foundation, the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS-TIFR), and the Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine (inStem) said on Monday they have collaborated to augment testing infrastructure and facilities to deal with the COVID- 19 pandemic.

If you have spent some time by the pond near the main canteen on campus, you might have noticed tiny damselflies zipping along by the edge of the pond. Because they are so small, you have to look closely to see their beautiful, vivid reds and blues. What do these colours mean? Do they signal something, and to whom? As humans, we signal a lot with the colour of our clothes, and have the luxury of changing them at will. For most animals, colour is not really a behavioural choice, but reflects myriad selection pressures in their evolutionary history.

So, instead of chasing these flies through the lab all day, in a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, doctoral researcher in the NICE group and first author on this study, Pavan Kaushik, tells Inverse they designed an entire virtual 3D world for just a single, small fly.

"Nothing humans have created to date has the computational prowess to navigate the world like a tiny little fly.

Researchers at the Bengaluru-based NCBS have used hair shed by tigers to identify their family relationships.
 

The study, published in Ecology and Evolution is co-authored by researchers at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru and senior forest officers of the Rajasthan Forest Department. The matrilineages were corroborated with the help of records of family trees maintained by the forest department.