A state known for its heritage, culture and disaster management, and as an emerging hub of scholarship and research, Odisha is making its mark. This special issue captures the aspirations of and challenges for the eastern Indian state in becoming the next national science hub.
Odisha is home to a number of large national institutes and laboratories – the Indian Institute of Technology, the Institute of Life Sciences, the Institute of Minerals and Material Technology, the Regional Medical Research Centre, the National Institute of Science Education and Research, National Rice Research Institute, the Central Institute of Freshwater Aquaculture and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. The state government-run Utkal University and the Orissa University of Agriculture and Technology in capital Bhubaneswar add to its scholarly might. Private education conglomerates such as the Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology University and the L V Prasad Eye Institute are helping produce a sizeable scientific workforce.
The entrepreneurship and innovation scene is warming up with a number of technology business incubators setting up shop in the state. A biotechnology cluster is also on the cards. The Odisha special issue takes a close look at this growth of innovation and technology in the state’s science.
Odisha’s 460km coastline and a hot, humid agro-climate, have endowed it with rich fisheries and paddy cultivation resources. The state’s scientific legacy in both aquaculture and rice research have benefitted from these. We examine the results of years of rice and fish breeding that Odisha has gifted to the world. The state’s proximity to the Bay of Bengal and high summer temperatures have also brought severe cyclones, floods and heat waves. We investigate how Odisha is setting an example in using science and technology to cope with such extreme weather phenomena.
Odisha’s rich culture and history draws international attention. Its many temples, monuments, ancient palm leaf manuscripts, paintings, and excavations are keenly researched by archaeologists, leading to innovative conservation methods to preserve Odisha’s past.
We analyse the traditional and modern methods being deployed by scientists, and focus on another rich historical source – shipwrecks – revealing fascinating stories of historic naval wars off the coast of Odisha.
India’s science and technology is well entrenched in metro areas, with institute clusters like those in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, the national capital region of Delhi, and Kolkata. Smaller, second-tier cities like Bhubaneswar are gearing up to the cluster approach, and are poised to contribute to the research and innovation scene. The Odisha special issue is an attempt to shine a light on one such state. In the near future, Nature India’s regional spotlights will chronicle more such emerging hubs of science in the country.
The Nature India special issue on Odisha is free to download here.
Very early on it became clear that the COVID-19 pandemic was not just a challenge for scientists and medical professionals. Almost a year into the coronavirus’s rampage across the world, there’s no doubt about the long-term impact that SARS-CoV-2 will continue to have on every facet of human life — from healthcare to education, social interaction, businesses, environmental concerns, and political processes.
India’s large population, governance, and creaky healthcare infrastructure have traditionally hampered the quick and smooth roll out of public health interventions. With this pandemic, it wasn’t any different. Nature Indiacovered the evolution of the crisis from several angles, going beyond the strict remit of science. Our coverage embraced a new normal in these unprecedented times. We looked at the physical and biological aspects of the virus extensively, and also published stories of how India, with its 1.2 billion-strong population, was responding to the health emergency. This resulted in Nature India’s first special issue on the COVID-19 crisis, published in June 2020.
Coping with a major public health catastrophe lies not just in vaccines and treatments, but also technologies that the world’s scientists quickly geared up to invent or repurpose. Within months of the novel coronavirus’ spread we saw the development of new ventilators, rapid antigen tests, personal protection equipment, and sanitization apparatus.
Nature India’s second COVID-19 special, focuses on such engineering and technology solutions being tested and deployed. We take a look at front-runners in nanomaterial design that are helping advanced antiviral and antibacterial therapies; the state-of-the-art in critical care ventilators and how in-silico docking studies are bringing new drug molecules.
The issue presents a selection of commentaries published in various Nature research journals highlighting the use of artificial intelligence tools and machine learning in scaling approaches for data, model and code sharing, and in adapting results to local conditions. Nanotechnology is offering hope in antimicrobial and antiviral formulations, and highly sensitive biosensors and detection platforms.
We ask whether nanoscientists can take better advantage of technology and automation in their laboratories to reveal new information about COVID-19. A host of reverse-engineered commercial medical equipment and devices for healthcare workers have flooded the market. While these ‘low-tech’ solutions are welcome for resource poor countries such as India, we argue that for real impact, they must affiliate to approved designs. We also shine a light on pandemic-fighting photonics tools (X-ray imaging and ultraviolet sterilization), the strengths and ethical questions around smartphone surveillance of the pandemic, and discuss why it is important for governments to implement public health measures aided by technology.
At the end of a trying year, we hope these new perspectives bring additional hope in efforts to tame the novel coronavirus.
The Nature India COVID-19 Engineering Solutions special issue is free to download here.
Rural communities grappling with livelihood issues and looking for support for farming activities are increasingly embracing technology for survival. Jayashree Balasubramanian, who heads communication at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) in Chennai, talks of her experience with farmers attending virtual ‘plant clinics’.
A virtual ‘plant clinic’ in progress.{credit}MSSRF{/credit}
It’s a Friday morning and Lakshmi, a farmer who grows paddy, maize and finger millet in central Tamil Nadu, is peering into her phone camera adjusting the webinar settings. From behind her, the top of her toddler’s head pops up on the screen as she navigates her way around the virtual ‘plant clinic’. “I can’t hear you sir, please unmute yourself,” Laxmi says several times in Tamil before the expert on the other side heeds.
‘Unmute’, ‘webinar’, ‘share video’, ‘chat message’ – the Tamil conversation is peppered with these English phrases. The e-plant clinic session is one of the ways in which farmers are getting technical advice and support amidst the world’s largest lockdown that India imposed in the last week of March 2020 to check the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Soon, 39 other farmers crowd up every inch of her phone’s screen. Many of these farmers are holding samples of pests or diseases that have affected their plants. Two ‘plant doctors’ are advising them online in this three-hour session. Some farmers are in their picturesque farms with mobile phones ready to zoom into on-site problems they need advice on.
During the ongoing lockdown, a survey found 227 million internet users in rural India, 10 per cent more than urban India. The increased use of internet at this time is opportune for the rural community grappling with livelihood issues and looking for technical support for farming activities.
Global farming communities have long advocated the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to empower farmers suggesting it may improve farmers’ livelihoods by as much as 500 per cent. The usual bottlenecks – lack of technology access, good connectivity, devices or capacity – suddenly seem to have eased under the pressure of the novel coronavirus crisis. The crucial need to connect is transforming how rural communities and holders of farming knowledge are working around these challenges.
For instance, the plant clinic which Laxmi sometimes attends alongside approximately 25 farmers every week, is rigged up in a physical venue and advertised beforehand so that farmers come prepared with their pest-disease affected plants to consult plant doctors. It also arms them against using any unscientific applications that may cause long-term damage to the soil or plants. A study by MSSRF found that e-clinics cost less than half of what a physical plant clinic would.
A farmer holding up a sample for the plant doctors to see.{credit}MSSRF{/credit}
Even before the pandemic struck, farmers have been part of such efforts where support is provided on phone or social media. “During the lockdown, farmers started video-calling us, and we realised their need for visual connection and advice,” says Ramasamy Rajkumar, who coordinates efforts across 150 villages in India since 2012. The first webinar on 16 April 2020 saw 82 farmers joining in. “It meant that this was a format we should continue,” he says. While physical clinics build knowledge and capacity, the virtual clinics are building technology skill and mutual support.
Losses from pests or disease attacks can have a devastating effect on crops causing huge damage. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that pest attacks account for 40 per cent of all yield losses prompting the United Nations designate 2020 as the International Year of Plant Health.
Since the beginning of the lockdown, MSSRF has conducted five webinars in three states of India. They have not been without their fun moments. Farmer Kandasamy from Ramasamypuram, had multiple queries and also brought in a neighbouring farmer who had a volley of questions needing resolution. Subramanian, a farmer from Aayavayal helped himself merrily to a snack as he waited for his turn. Meanwhile, Muhammed Andakkulam altered his user name to ‘Beer’, to symbolically reflect reopening of liquor shops in his state of Tamil Nadu. The plant doctors patiently go through each query, sharing their recommendations in the chat box and promising support later on the phone.
Sometimes rural callers also glitch out but resurface miraculously and complete the call, to the envy of urban bandwith-squeezed callers. Most stay connected even after their query is answered, listening to other recommendations on a variety of crops from paddy to brinjal and black gram to coconut.
The farmers’ questions range from concerns over yellowing of groundnut leaves, discolouring of jasmine flowers, white-coloured pests on coconut tree leaves and withering of banana leaves. The common pests they report during the lockdown are whiteflies, thrips, aphids and green leafhoppers.
Purshothaman Senthilkumar, a plant doctor in the Pudukkottai district of Tamil Nadu, says the small farmers are facing issues in marketing their yields and report up to 40 per cent losses. “Those who did not have adequate labour to harvest have seen up to 20 per cent losses in the field,” he says. Seasonal pests and diseases have been compounded by shortage of labourers, maintenance, shop closures and non-availability of expert guidance.
E-plant clinics have not only been about technology and technical guidance, but also about moral support for the farming communities.
Many scientists embrace the artistic medium to infuse new ideas into their scientific works. With science-art collaborations, both artists and scientists challenge their ways of thinking as well as the process of artistic and scientific inquiry. Can art hold a mirror to science? Can it help frame and answer uncomfortable questions about science: its practice and its impact on society? Do artistic practices inform science? In short, does art aid evidence?
Nature India’s blog series ‘SciArt Scribbles’ will try to answer some of these questions through the works of some brilliant Indian scientists and artists working at this novel intersection that offers limitless possibilities. You can follow this online conversation with #SciArtscribbles .
Mukund Thattai, a physicist practicing biology at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), talks to us about bio-art and how some bio-artists from Bangalore are challenging scientists’ new-found power to edit life.
Mukund Thattai
Genetically enhanced humans have long been a staple of science fiction. He Jiankui’s announcement in November 2018 of the birth the world’s first genome-edited babies drew flak for flouting ethical norms governing the use of genome editing technologies. This wasn’t the first time scientists had used the DNA cutting-and-pasting tool known as CRISPR to modify genes in embryos. It was, however, the first time such embryos had been implanted and brought to term in their mothers’ womb. The modifications introduced into the twins’ genomes confer no medical benefit, and may even cause harm. It is an irreversible human tragedy: the baby girls, who never asked for this, will spend the rest of their lives as scientific specimens.
Nevertheless, genome editing is here to stay. Will we learn how to use this technology responsibly?
This is the central question that animates iGEM, the International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition. Inspired by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) robotics competitions, iGEM looks at a future in which engineering and biology are indistinguishable. What would happen if we could build new types of cells?
I was at MIT in the early 2000s when iGEM was founded. Though I was doing a PhD in the physics department, I’d grown fascinated with biology. Across campus in the computer science department, Tom Knight and Drew Endy were thinking about how to bring notions of abstraction and design to biological engineering. In 2003, they threw out an inspiring challenge to MIT undergrads: could they engineer bacteria that would blink like Christmas lights? The very next year, undergrads from five US universities tried their hand at engineering cells. In 2005, 13 undergrad teams from the US, Canada, the UK, and Switzerland participated in the first international iGEM at MIT, in what has now become an annual jamboree of creations for student teams from around the world.
Science with a dose of fantasy
iGEMmers think of cells as computers, running an operating system that provides basic functions such as the ability to replicate DNA, translate genes into proteins, and convert nutrients into energy. Designer genes are like applications running on top of the operating system. iGEM teams remix components known as BioBricks, an enormous collection of DNA-based “standard biological parts” that give cells new chemical and physical abilities. Over the years iGEM has featured applications that allow cells to keep time, store a digital bit of information, sense toxic chemicals, and carry out basic computations.
The ethos of iGEM, and indeed of the entire synthetic biology community, has always included a culture of openness, sharing, and excitement for science, coupled with rigorous engineering and ethical practice. In the early 2000s, iGEM embodied a bracing and idealistic vision of our biological future, with a dose of fantasy. At the time our actual ability to manipulate genomes was rather limited. With the advent of CRISPR, this has now changed.
From 2012 to 2014 He Jiankui was the leader of the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTC) iGEM team. In December 2018, the iGEM Foundation released this statement: “We are stunned and disappointed by Dr. He’s actions, particularly as a former iGEM team leader. Conducting human genome engineering – and further, doing so without proper research or backing from the broader scientific community – is a clear violation of iGEM’s standards as well as those of the scientific community at large. Had this project been proposed within the iGEM competition, it would have been disqualified for violating iGEM’s policies.”
The power of genome editing is rapidly outpacing our ability to predict its effects or regulate its practice. To deal with this monumental challenge, biologists will need to go far beyond the routine laboratory spaces in which they operate. They will need to partner with historians, social scientists, ethicists and artists. An energetic collective of bio-artists is leading the charge.
Making bacteria that evoke petrichor
In 2009, a group of art students from Bangalore stood before the iGEM judging panel describing an unusual summer project: to construct bacteria that would synthesise geosmin, the substance responsible for the evocative smell of the first monsoon rains. The team’s presentation documented their journey of discovery, as they learned the language and techniques of the life sciences and explored its cultural, ethical, and aesthetic implications. As one of their team leaders, I sat nervously in the back row. My nervousness evaporated when we received thunderous applause from a packed hall. One of the iGEM judges declared: “This changes the way I think about synthetic biology.”
Here’s a little back story to this extraordinary scene.
In 2004, I relocated from MIT to India to set up a synthetic biology lab at the NCBS in Bangalore. Reshma Shetty, an MIT graduate student working with Drew Endy, and I discussed how to put together an iGEM team from India. In the summer of 2006 I ran an open workshop called “A crash course in designer biological networks” to overwhelming response. We assembled an NCBS student team that brainstormed on the kinds of “genetic circuits” that could be built. We zeroed in on one old classic idea: teaching cells to blink. But then we confronted the messiness of biology: all the circuits we built expressed the right proteins and seemed to be correctly assembled, but did not do what they were supposed to.
The team went to MIT as the first from India, and competed with 31 others, only to report three negative results. These were later published in a paper which (to my great surprise) has actually been cited! (In 2012 Navneet Rai, a student guided by K.V. Venkatesh at IIT Bombay and me, finally succeeded in making blinking cells as part of his PhD research).
The iGEM atmosphere was electric, and each one of us came away with a lifelong memory of being present at the start of something big.
Next year, with help from a summer research fellows programme at Indian Academy of Sciences, I assembled a team of six undergraduate students from six Indian institutions. Our project was a proof of principle: “How to build and test a genetically engineered machine in six weeks”. 2008 saw a group of IIT Madras students mentored by their professor Guhan Jayaraman, raise funds with institute alumnus and biotech entrepreneur Shrikumar Suryanarayanan. The team was judged as having the “Best Foundational Advance” at iGEM 2008, and got a special prize for the “Best Engineered BioBrick device”. Many members of this team went on to co-found, with Suryanarayanan, the biotech company Sea6 Energy.
Later IIT Madras iGEM teams have also had great success: the 2011 team was awarded the “Best New BioBrick Part” for a light-induced pump, and in 2013 it received the award for “Best Human Practices”. Since iGEM 2009, which involved 100 teams from 25 countries, multiple teams from India have made consistent appearances each year. Credit for this goes to iGEM mentors across the country, and also to India’s Department of Biotechnology, which encourages and supports the teams through the Indian Biological Engineering Competition (iBEC).
Breaking boundaries
At iGEM 2009, we broke many boundaries.
I had just started working with Yashas Shetty from the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore. Yashas combines art and technology, pushing the boundaries of synthesis and sensation. He wondered whether a living piece of art would be an appropriate iGEM project, something that could provoke and inspire people to think about biology. He then narrowed down the problem, asking: “Could we make a biological device that can influence human emotions?” Out of this was born the “Smell of Rain” project. Yashas and his students landed up in my lab, where they learned molecular biology under Navneet’s experienced stewardship, and formally signed up as iGEM contenders. Describing themselves as “outsiders” in a competition dominated by engineers and scientists, the very existence of the team was a unique experiment in art-science collaboration.
It marked the beginning of an unusual and fruitful collaboration between NCBS and Srishti, under the provocative name ArtScienceBangalore. Building on their “Smell of Rain” success, in 2010 the students imagined a “post-natural ecology” exploring the interactions of genetically-engineered bacteria and worms on a petri-dish, in collaboration with Sandhya Koushika and her student Sunaina Surana at NCBS.
In 2011 the team went even further with their project “Searching for the ubiquitous genetically engineered machine”. They imagined a far future in which bioengineered cells from iGEM covered the planet. How could we tell what was natural and what was artificial then, if we did not establish a baseline today? The students sampled ecosystems across the state of Karnataka, including urban, rural, and forest areas, and used a sensitive method called PCR to search for any evidence of BioBricks in the environment. They did not find any, implying that any future BioBricks in the wild must come from human activity. This foundational effort was awarded the “Best Human Practices Advance”, with the judges particularly praising the role of art-science engagement.
These ArtScienceBangalore projects have gone on to win honourable mentions at the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica prizes, and are currently displayed at the Science Gallery in Dublin.
Does science belong just to scientists?
The idea that artists should be taught molecular biology strikes some scientists as frivolous, and appears to others as dangerous. Is it a worthy use of genetic engineering to make bacteria that can evoke the smell of rain? Why should non-scientists – “outsiders” – be trusted with these hard-won powers? But by the same token, it is reasonable to ask why scientists should be trusted with these very powers.
Scientists and inventors have used genetic engineering to probe the inner workings of cells, as well as to create new medicines, cure diseases and improve crops. The combined benefit of these activities to humanity has been tremendous. In this backdop, cases like He Jiankui’s are an aberration. Nevertheless, the genome-edited baby controversy is a critical opportunity to move the conversation forward.
It is the responsibility of the scientific community to continually earn society’s trust. In this ongoing process, artists have a unique role as observers of the human condition. Bio-artists push the limits of what can be done using the tools of science. They do this to provoke, to make us uncomfortable, to make us think. They do this now, today, so we are forced to imagine and prepare for what might happen in the future.
[Mukund Thattai is at the Simons Centre for the Study of Living Machines, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore. He can be contacted at thattai@ncbs.res.in.]
Ayushi is an undergraduate microbiology student at Amity University, Noida, Uttar Pradesh. Her interest in what makes life tick made her fall in love with bacteria and astrobiology, and her passion for making scientific research more efficient and accessible led her to explore bioinformatics. She has been a part of research projects investigating nanoparticle-plant interactions, transgenic algae, and bacteria-algae associations.
Recently, an economist friend told me that “scientific inquiry is inherently cursed.” At first I was offended. But I had to agree after he elaborated further – science today suffers from something economists enigmatically call the “winner’s curse”.
The first scientific journals were print editions — something akin to a printed memo — circulated among researchers to update them of the findings of others in the field. To submit a paper for publication, only the observations required to prove results needed to be included in a manuscript, and rightly so: if every paper included every shred of data, journals would run into thousands of pages. This means, though, that what was communicated to the scientific community was only a fraction of what could have been communicated: only the observations that were ‘winners’ – the ones which best supported a result – would be presented, and the others would be effectively relegated to obscurity. Although we’re not limited by paper and page counts today, the same pattern of data use continues. This leads us to the problem of the winner’s curse: by the process of selection, the ‘winning’ observation oversells itself.
In economics, the winner’s curse refers to situations in auctions where the winner tends to overpay, because the actual value of the product is the average of the bids, not the highest bid. In scientific research, the curse takes hold in scientists who aim for publication in the most selective journals, with the most impressive results being favored. This ignores all the other results — the ones which weren’t so impressive — while giving disproportionate importance to the ‘winning result’.
The problem with this phenomenon isn’t immediately evident — isn’t the result what actually matters? The data is, after all, just a tool, necessary only to prove what’s important — the conclusion. In looking for conclusions in data, however, researchers can forget to ask: “does the conclusion effectively justify my repeated sampling of the real world?” In other words, is reality accurately reflected by the dataset presented? All the observations we take, whether they are inconclusive, negative, or ‘winners’, represent an analysis of the natural world. By only reporting the ones that work, the other sampling efforts cannot be used by anyone else. This process confers on a small, selected number of observations the authority to predict an unpredictable future! Back in the auction house, this would mean the value of the product is set only by the winning bid. When we report only the best set of data, we are relegating the less impressive observations to obscurity, even though these also represent an analysis of the real world, with real potential to inform.
So what does this mean for us? How should scientists avoid falling into the trap of the winner’s curse? One way would be to save, store and share all data — not just positive results. We are only human. By making our data openly accessible, we can avoid internal inconsistencies. The smallest of mistakes would be corrected by fresh eyes poring over the very same data.
Ayushi Sood
More importantly, open data could prove to be a shot in the arm for scientific inquiry as a whole. What data I find important may be perfect for my study, yet a small cluster of ignored numbers in my dataset could lead to a breakthrough for someone else, possibly in a way that I could never have imagined! Gene expression data in cancer cells could provide insights into cell signaling pathways in neurodegenerative disorders. Algal bloom observations in polluted lakes could help in effective biomass production for algal biofuel. The analysis and application of open data could usher in a new age of scientific connectivity, with the available knowledge transcending traditional discipline boundaries in way never seen before.
Well, if it’s so good, why hasn’t open data been the norm since science began? We come back to the thousand-page journal here — the question wasn’t of why not, but of how. Transmitting every single byte of data through papers and talks was impossible before the advent of computers and the emergence of the internet in the 1990s. In 2017, however, we have the tools at our disposal to store, parse, organize and retrieve every single digit. The burgeoning field of data science and analysis is ours to exploit, just waiting to script the next scientific success story.
So, I have to hand it to the economists on this one — the winner’s curse is alive and kicking in science. But, like any good scientist, I’m thinking of solutions, and every clue suggests that open data, accessibility and collaboration could be just the spell that breaks this curse.
In this guest post, Navi Radjou draws from his experience at a hands-on education and problem-solving school in Mumbai. He points out that France’s strong science and engineering capabilities, combined with the Indian concept of jugaad, or frugal ingenuity, could help solve problems that threaten all of humanity.
Navi Radjou
A recent Gallup International Association poll rates French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the two of the most favoured world leaders. They have a historic opportunity to use their huge popularity and goodwill at home and abroad to heal our fractured world. They can do so by bolstering co-innovation between India and France — through top-down R&D partnerships such as the International Solar Alliance as well as bottom-up collaborative initiatives like the STEAM School.
By bringing together Indian and French engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, designers, artists and business leaders, the two countries can create solutions to what I call “problems without borders”: social inequality, global warming, chronic diseases, water and food scarcity.
In December 2017, I attended the Indo-French STEAM School in Mumbai — which shows how co-innovation can have a major positive impact worldwide. The 10-day programme was co-organized, like every year, by the French Embassy in India, the Paris-based Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity, and Maker’s Asylum, a community space in Mumbai. The programme enables STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) education through hands-on problem-solving based on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
100 participants, mostly from France and India — architects, designers, artists, engineers, academics, and students — formed 19 teams to design a product each to tackle one of five specific SDGs in the Indian context: health, education, water/sanitation, energy, and sustainable cities. Over the course of the programme, the participants developed working prototypes of their products.
Participants at the STEAM School 2017
These four products I liked best harnessed frugal innovation to devise simple and cost-effective solutions to major socio-economic and ecological problems:
BAT: a low-cost wrist-wearable to aid the visually impaired. According to a Lancet study, 36 million people in the world are blind, a number set to increase to 115 million by 2050. In India alone, 8.8 million citizens suffer from blindness and nearly 48 million have moderate and severe vision impairment, the largest number for any country. BAT, fitted with a Six Axis feedback mechanism, can make life easier for such people while they navigate public spaces, by vibrating to alert them of obstacles.
The SADA Kit: A portable solution to prevent water-borne health epidemics caused by open-air defecation in rural India. 2.5 billion in the world still lack access to toilets. 300 million Indian women and girls are affected by it. The kit aims to improve the health, safety, and dignity of these women. It comprises of a lightweight portable toilet with a pop-up privacy shield, a waste disposal bag, a small wearable light and whistle, soap, and sanitary pads for women.
BIJLI: a low-cost energy generation device that can be retrofitted to bicycles. It transforms kinetic energy from the wheels into electric energy that can be stored in a battery pack or can be used to charge small electronic gadgets like mobile phones. The device can be used on the go or while the bicycle is stationary. Distributed energy solutions like BIJLI can be a boon for the 300 million Indians who live with little or no electricity today.
WASTED: a smart waste segregation bin that helps spread awareness of how much waste we generate. By turning the process of segregation into a game and connecting sensors in the actual bin to an app, it enables users to track and compare waste statistics with friends and neighbors. The idea is to “nudge” people and societies towards zero waste. India generates over 100,000 metric tons of solid waste each day, higher than any other country. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimates that by adopting the circular economy principles—through reuse and recycling of waste and resources—India could reap $624 billion in annual benefits in 2050 and cut greenhouse gas emissions by 44%.
“The goal of STEAM School isn’t to solve the SDGs in 10 days, but to teach how to solve them,” says Vaibhav Chhabra, founder of Maker’s Asylum. “STEAM also teaches empathy and tolerance to participants. They learn to transcend their differences, respect each other, and find unity in a shared purpose. They become globally-conscious problem-solvers.”
Vaibhav is right. I interacted with French students from CRI, EM Lyon Business School, and Institut Mines-Télécom at STEAM School, who had developed greater respect for India and its culture by working together with Indians. A Hindi saying captures the power of such synergies: Ek Aur Ek Gyarah Hote Hain, or One and One Equals Eleven. France’s strong science and engineering capabilities, combined with the Indian concept of jugaad, or frugal ingenuity, could help us solve problems that threaten all of humanity.
As a French-Indian, I am thrilled to be part of this process. I left India in 1989 to study in France. During the 80s and 90s, France and India were relatively closed to the outside world. Cooperation between both countries was also limited. I long dreamed of a day when India and France would team up to create solutions without borders. Now my dream is finally coming true.
The theme of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2018 in Davos was “Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World.” You can’t fix a fractured and conflict-ridden world with the competitive zero-sum mindset that has long dominated world affairs. Instead, it’s time to adopt the cooperative “1+1=11” formula. Macron and Modi can show the way.
Mumbai-born Aaswath Raman, who grew up in Canada and is now a Canadian citizen, researches unique new ways of harnessing a largely unexploited renewable source of energy — the cold of the universe. Raman moved to the USA for his bachelor’s degree in 2002 and is currently a research associate with the Ginzton Laboratory at Stanford University, where he investigates “radiative or sky cooling” to develop prototype systems for cooling, refrigeration and beyond.
K. S. Jayaraman spoke to Aaswath Raman to find out how you can air-condition your building without electricity.
Here’s Jayaraman’s guest blog.
Aaswath Raman
Aaswath Raman and his colleagues at Stanford University recently reported1 that it is potentially possible to air-condition a building through the technology of “radiative sky cooling” using a new coating material they have developed.
I wrote to Raman, co-lead author of this paper, and he replied explaining the mechanism: “Radiative sky cooling exploits a natural property of our atmosphere. If you can dissipate heat as infrared radiation into something that is very cold — like outer space — you can cool a building without any electricity. This then provides a completely passive, non-evaporative way to cool below the ambient air temperature.”
The heart of the invention is an ultrathin multilayered material Raman and co-workers — Eli Goldstein and Shanhui Fan — had developed and first tested in 2014. The material, made of seven layers of silicon dioxide and hafnium oxide on top of a thin layer of silver, does two things at the same time. It beams invisible infrared heat from within a building into the cold outer space (using it as a heat sink), while simultaneously reflecting virtually all of the incoming sunlight that would otherwise warm up the building.
According to the authors, the material thus acts both “as a radiator and an excellent mirror” and the net result is cooler buildings that require less air conditioning. “The internal structure of the material is tuned to radiate infrared rays at a frequency that lets them pass into space without warming the air near the building.”
In 2014, these researchers showed that optical surfaces could be designed to enable this cooling effect even on a sunny day. In their recent work, they tested a system — with panels coated with the specialised material laid atop pipes of running water — on the roof of a Stanford University building. They found the panels were able to consistently reduce the temperature of the water 3 to 5 degrees Celsius below ambient air temperature over a period of three days.
When connected to refrigeration or air conditioning systems they can improve efficiency 20% or more. Raman and his colleagues are now commercialising the technology as a startup, SkyCool Systems, and have a pilot demonstration active in California, USA. They have already partnered with a manufacturer that can produce large sheets of the cooling material for further development.
The panels in operation with cooling systems at a field trial in the US.
And how does it apply to a country like India? “For Indian buildings our fluid cooling panels can have a major impact in commercial refrigeration in supermarkets, cold storage facilities, data centers, office buildings, malls and other commercial buildings,” he offers. “Also, there is the remarkable opportunity to use this technology to enable completely electricity-free, low-grade cooling in rural scenarios.”
At least two technical problems remain to be solved before the technology is put to practical use. The engineers must first figure out how to efficiently deliver the building’s heat to the coating material and secondly, create fabrication facilities that can make the panels at the scales needed.
Goldstein, E. A. et al. Sub-ambient non-evaporative fluid cooling with the sky. Nat. Energy (2017) doi: 10.1038/nenergy.2017.143
An innovative and affordable infant hearing screening device was launched in New Delhi this week. Nature India intern Kate Telma, from the Graduate Program in Science Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), attended the launch and came back educated about the significance and necessity of auditory screening for newborns.
Here’s her guest post about the device Sohum, whose name comes from Vedic philosophy – the Sanskrit meaning closely reflecting the Universe’s response to a child’s first cry.
“The most important thing is to screen babies — on time — no matter where they are born,” says Nitin Sisodia, the founder and CEO of Sohum Innovation Lab, a market-driven solutions firm that works to improve the health and incomes of people living in resource-poor settings.
Sisodia and his team of designers, engineers, & business people are now focused on spreading awareness around hearing loss, testing infants and creating an army of training audiologists to do the job. Their newborn hearing screening device Sohum measures an auditory brainstem response, considered the gold standard in auditory testing. Designed for mass screening, the test takes only 90 seconds and can be performed on an infant who is awake.
Sisodia is a 2010 School of International Biodesign (formerly Stanford India Biodesign) fellow, and was chosen to represent one of the 35 startups to visit the Silicon Valley with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015.
The device was developed with support from the Department of Biotechnology and mentorship from AIIMS, IIT Delhi, and Stanford University. Launched July 17 in New Delhi, it is the fourth product to come from the School of International Biodesign programme (SIB), an initiative that focuses on innovative, low-cost, ‘Made in India’ technologies and devices. Other successful products include Qora, a fecal incontinence management system that debuted in India last year.
{credit}Karthikeyan Gopinathan{/credit}
Each year, 800,000 babies are born with hearing loss — 100,000 of them in India. Roughly 90% of children with hearing impairments in the first month of life are born in low- and middle- income countries. Children in these settings are also more likely to have ear infections or meningitis, other causes for hearing loss that contribute to compromised education and employment later in life.
Ideally, hearing deficits would be detected by three months of age; by six months, the child is fitted with hearing aids or cochlear implant. Currently, hearing loss is diagnosed around age 4, and often much later. Most times, this is too late for effective intervention.
The lack of newborn screening in India has been a concern. While nearly all infants born in the US are screened, and more than 33 European countries have nation-wide screenings in place, majority of hospitals in India do not offer any hearing screening.
Sohum is easy to handle. Even semi-skilled healthcare workers can easily interpret the simple read out of “pass,” “refer,” or “redo”. Data is sent to remote audiologists for verification, and added to a central data bank. The device also functions well in noisy settings, performing with 100% sensitivity in 60 decibels — about the noise level of a busy classroom or restaurant.
The device is expected to be made available to hospitals and primary care centres across India, with plans to reach out to maternity centres and vaccination camps to screen babies born at home. Balram Bhargava, the SIB executive director had a word of advice for the Sohum team. “You will have to manufacture fast,” he said, because the need and demand are clear.
[This blog post was updated on 28 June 2017 to include some more sources that estimate voluntary blood donation in India and to address other issues around it.]
Kate Telma
Need a unit of A- blood delivered to your hospital? There’s an app for that.
Nature India intern Kate Telma, from the Graduate Program in Science Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), met an enthusiastic group of blood donors at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi this week.
Here’s her guest post on this life-saving app they launched to mark World Blood Donor Day on June 14.
While cycling through the city, your phone pings. Someone in the area with your blood type needs blood. In less than a minute, you swipe through the pre-screening questions — Any drinks last night? Currently on antibiotics? Dengue, chikungunya, or jaundice in the last six months? Pre-screening approved, you head to the nearby hospital to donate blood.
That’s the ‘Donor On Call’ Android app (iOS and Windows versions in the works), which connects patients in the National Capital Region of India with nearby, voluntary blood donors.
A screenshot of the app
The number of non-remunerative blood donations in India has been on the rise since the country adopted the in the early 2000s. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that voluntary blood donation in India had risen to 85% percent in 2016. But hematologist Dharma Choudhury, who mentors Donor On Call, estimates the percentage of voluntary donations to be much lower. The remainder of collected blood units are known as “replacements”. When someone needs a blood transfusion, family members and friends are called to give units of blood to the hospital blood bank to replace the blood credited to the patient.
Pratap Chandnani founded Donor On Call in 2014 through the Green Shakti Foundation, an organization that engages Delhi NCR citizens on issues of environmental sustainability, urbanization, and resource utilization. By connecting recipients directly with donors in real time, Chandnani hopes to reduce blood storage costs, and to prevent wasting some of the estimated 600,000 litres of blood thrown out by hospitals across India in the last five years. Though discarding some of these blood units was inevitable—donated blood needs to be screened for sterility and pass serological testing before it can be safely given to anybody else—some of the blood was likely thrown out because it had been stored beyond its validity.
Unlike more traditional organ and blood donation programmes, Donor On Call encourages donors to get to know recipients. “Very rarely, there are situations where people want to donate on their birthday, or their anniversary,” to anybody who needs it, says Chandnani. “As a norm, it will be a specific need. You know the patient; you have an idea of the disease.”
“By suggesting that blood donation should happen at the time of need, [and] that too with the involvement of the family of the patient, the proposed solution actually violates two fundamental elements of the design of any modern blood transfusion service – a) The need to have adequate supply of blood on [the] shelf for each patient in need – thoroughly tested and processed. And b) the fact that the responsibility of organising blood is that of the hospital and not of the patient’s family,” Agarwal wrote in an email to Nature India.
Currently, Donor On Call is focused on building a robust donor base in the Delhi NCR area, and has roughly 6,100 donors registered so far. In addition to organizing blood for specific rare groups, Donor On Call encourages donors to pursue a healthy lifestyle through yoga, cycling, running and nature walks. Demand for the service is spreading to smaller towns such as Singrauli and Simla, but Chandnani worries that the mobile network might not support the app in the northern region. The developers are also creating a manual call-in option for people without access to smart phones.
Donors at the launch voiced some concerns, like feeling they needed to donate in response to a request, even if they couldn’t. In some cases, concerned family members submit several requests, depleting the donors in the area even without medical need. And there was a rumour of a couple rogue donors charging for their donation. Chandnani’s concerns for the app centre around seasonal impacts and climate change. Shifting weather patterns have brought previously unseen diseases such as dengue to the area. The air pollution levels during the winter in Delhi are very high, so a good number of donors go on antibiotics.
Every week, Indigenus brings you some interesting and relevant posts from sister blog Naturejobs, a leading online resource for scientists in academia and industry who seek guidance in developing their careers. The blog delivers a mix of expert advice and personal stories to help readers review, set and achieve their career goals.
This week we have a video from the Naturejobs Career Expo, San Francisco, 2016.
We ask Ambika Bumb how to start a startup.
(Ambika Bumb is the founder and CEO of Bikanta, a company that specialises in nanodiamond-based medical imaging technology. She graduated from Georgia Tech and obtained a doctorate from Oxford while on the prestigious Marshall Scholarship. She completed two post-doctoral fellowships at the National Cancer Institute and National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in the US.)
