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.

If you’ve ever tried to swat a fly, you know how hard it is to follow its movements as it ducks and weaves around to escape. You can easily appreciate that a scientist trying to observe and understand the behavior of insects in the natural world has their work cut out.

“Collecting and sequencing the whole genome with shed hairs of tigers is something that has been done for the first time,” said Anubhab Khan, who led the study done by the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru, in collaboration with the Rajasthan Forest Department and Medgenome Labs.