A workshop organised on snow leopards included training from experts at IME, NDF, JU, WWF, NCF, and NCBS.

Prof. Olsson and a team of researchers have been studying the coffee white stem borer. Their aim is to study the insect and the way it approaches various plants and its response to plant volatiles so that a ecologically derived management strategy can be worked out. According to her, historically, it has been noted that the beetle attacks only arabica unless the area is heavily infested. However, recent studies by the team, published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, have shown that this is not because the beetle is more attracted to one variety than the other.

https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/study-proposes-repurposed-drug...

Using computational models, an Indian research team has showed the amount of testing mattered more than the sensitivity of the tests used

The paper authored by Philip Cherian and Gautam Menon of Ashoka University and Sandeep Krishna of NCBS appeared in the journal PLoS Computational Biology on Thursday.

All mammals, for example harbour between 2 to 3.5 billion bits of data in every one of their cells.

Since March 2020, scientists from the Institute of Natural History Education and Research (INHER), Pune have described seven new species of scorpions from the Western Ghats – six from the Sahyadris in Maharashtra and one from the southern Western Ghats near Bengaluru.

In this article on, ‘Bad science’: Planting frenzy misses the grasslands for the trees, the writer refers to work from Jayashree Ratnam, Mahesh Sankaran and colleagues on tropical savannahs. 

Read the article: https://news.mongabay.com/2021/05/bad-science-planting-frenzy-misses-the...

Dr. Laasya Samhita’s interview with Bio Patrika hosting “Vigyan Patrika”, a series of author interviews. Dr. Laasya is postdoc and DBT/Wellcome Trust early career fellow with Dr. Deepa Agashe, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore. As an independent postdoctoral fellow, she works in an Evolutionary Biology laboratory and blends molecular biology with evolution, investigating how errors in protein synthesis can influence bacterial adaptation, and even turn out to be good for the cell.