You may be familiar with MS Blue, the distinctive shade of blue, named for the legendary Carnatic vocalist M.S. Subbalakshmi, but now “Mas Blue,” is all set to wow the world of art. “Mas” comes from the initials of Prof. M.A. Subramanian, the material scientist from Madras, the inventor of the vivid blue pigment known to the wider world as YInMn blue, (pronounced yin-min). “Mas,” in Spanish, means more. YInMn blue is bluer compared to any blue pigment humankind has seen before. Modern computers can display a slew of colors and creative humans have always dreamt up unique hues, but to transform any color, digital or imagined, into something real – something you can paint a wall with say – you need a pigment, and making a pigment calls for considerable ingenuity (or a very good understanding of chemistry) and, yes, some luck. Which is why the invention of the pigment YInMn blue is such a big deal.

“People have been looking for a good, durable blue pigment for a couple of centuries now,” says the academic, who earned his PhD from IIT, Madras. He recalls writing the first chapter of his doctoral thesis sitting on the grounds of Ashtalakshmi Temple in Besant Nagar, close to the institute’s campus. Nearly all his formal education was from institutions within a few mile-radius of his home in Mambalam in Chennai. Subramanian went to Texas for his postdoctoral education. After a distinguished career as a researcher for over two decades at DuPont, the American chemical giant, where he discovered several functional materials that found use mostly in electronics or energy conversion, he now teaches chemistry in Oregon State University.

In 2009, a graduate student in Subramanian’s research lab, pulverized a mixture of the oxides of yttrium, indium, and manganese, and baked the mixture, to try and create another material for use in high-tech electronics. When they opened the oven door the next day, a dazzling blue powder greeted them. His first thought Subramanian says, was an uncharitable one, “perhaps, the student has made some mistake.” But he recalled colleagues at DuPont saying that blue pigments are hard to make.

So, the researchers repeated the experiment and tested the material which turned out to be non-toxic and stable. Besides, it was resistant to heat and impervious to water, oil, and acids. Further, the material didn’t fade in sunlight, and it could block solar heat efficiently. So, it was an excellent candidate for use in outdoor paints and industrial coatings. It is going to be expensive, given the components — Yttrium is classified a rare earth metal and is hard to find– but the pigment holds great appeal in art because of its aesthetics.

“The reason YInMn blue is special is because, this blue is very similar to the ultramarine blue used by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel,” says Subramanian. For the “Last Judgement” the sculptor-painter used this very bright and beautiful blue to depict the heavenly skies. During the Middle Ages, the pigment was made from lapis lazuli, literally blue rocks, from the Hindu Kush mountains. It came from beyond the sea – hence the term ultramarine. Even though ultramarine pigment was expensive – literally worth its weight in gold – Michelangelo insisted on using this pigment for the fresco on the altar wall, The Last Judgement, which was unveiled in 1541. Earlier, when Michelangelo had painted on the ceiling of Sistine Chapel, he had accepted a flat rate for labor and paint. This time he decided to bill labor and materials separately. It is human nature to insist on the best possible material, when someone else — especially in this case when someone who is opulently rich — is footing the bill and that is what the artist did. He picked the ultramarine pigment. And now  YInMn is being considered to restore the blue in the painting in Sistine Chapel.

Before he invented the blue pigment YInMn blue, Subramanian did not like to visit art museums. In fact, he says he used to grumble when he had to accompany his wife, Dr. Rajeevi Subramanian, artist and material scientist, to Louvre (France), Prada (Spain) and Guggenheim (U.S.A) to see the work of the Old Masters. Now those paintings, especially the ones that feature blue pigments, speak to him. Over the last decade, Subramanian has been an invited speaker at top art museums the world over.

Synthetic blue pigments have a rich and interesting history. The early 18^th century saw the discovery of the first modern synthetic blue pigment, Prussian Blue, also known as Berlin Blue. Under the Wave off Kanagawa, one of Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, has been an icon of Japan since the print was first struck in 1830. Its intense blue comes from Prussian Blue ink – then a foreign pigment for Japan, imported, probably via China, from Europe.

In the next century, another pigment, Cobalt Blue made its appearance on the scene. Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” for instance, makes stunning use of Cobalt Blue. Synthetic ultramarine came soon after ,we still use a form of ultramarine to make our white clothes appear whiter , but its manufacture is not green, meaning it pollutes the environment. These pigments, which could be manufactured in bulk, were just chemicals, before the old masters painted with them.

In early 2021, YInMn Blue became widely available to artists. Any day now, someone could paint a modern masterpiece worthy of the pigment. The inventor’s wife, an art aficionado and artist to boot got first dibs on the first synthetic blue pigment to be invented in two centuries. “I believe I was the first to paint with YInMn in watercolor and acrylic,” says Dr. Rajeevi Subramanian. “When Mas first showed me the YInMn pigment I was blown away by its intensity and hue. I really wanted to paint with it.” Even a child, this color had been her favorite. “I’d paint big skies, and large ponds with blue fish, even my mountains were blue,” she says.

For color scientists, YInMn blue is a gift that keeps on giving (an Artist’s Akshayapatra, if you will.) Subramanian’s research team has used its understanding of its crystal structure and chemical makeup to try and create other safe, stable synthetic pigments of various hues. How? By modifying the ratio of existing elements in YInMn, the researchers could tweak the intensity of blue from light blue to almost black. Next, they tweaked the elements in the material. By adding copper, they got a green pigment; with the addition of iron, they got an orange pigment and so on.

 The holy grail of the pigment industry is a bright, stable red, the kind which a luxury automobile maker like Ferrari can use to paint sport cars. People in the industry say that the inventor of the Ferrari red can hope to retire early.  Despite his new fame, apart from his new-found interest in art, Prof. Subramaniam remains a man of simple tastes, who loves curiosity-driven research, and his nightly meal of curd rice and pickle. Money is not a motivator for Mas. The researcher, who earned his PhD in 1982, still enjoys spending most of his time in the lab. “People say you don’t have a life if you do this, but it’s not true. It’s just that you enjoy what you do,” says the man whose name is now part of pigment lore.

A BlueTiful Story — Hear the man speak of his invention.  

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Dilip Kumar, Booksellers and Exporters, was the name of the Tamil literary bookstore he ran in Mylapore, Chennai. For over a quarter century research scholars and avid readers dropped in here to discuss books with the genial owner. This was till 2016. He also shipped books to the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington D.C. At 67, he is still the go-to person for anyone seeking recommendations on modern fiction in this ancient language spoken by eighty million people.

The retired bookseller is a gifted, though not prolific, Tamil writer. He has published three collections of short stories. With his appreciation for the absurd, he crafts short stories with universal appeal. They’ve have been translated into many European and Indian languages. Pavel Hons, a Tamil scholar from the Czech Academy of Sciences, said that he enjoys the author’s sense of humor, which he finds, “very peculiar sometimes, but lovely…” Hons translated some of Kumar’s work into Czech, for his compatriots to savor.

Kumar wants readers the world over to appreciate the works of serious Tamil writers. Recently, he edited The Tamil Story: Through the Times, Through the Tides, a comprehensive selection showcasing the best Tamil short stories of the 20^th century. Tamil, which has a strong literary tradition is known for classics, but it has good modern literature too, Kumar has always maintained. Through his work as an editor, Kumar has tried to ensure that such quality work reaches its audience, both in the original, and through translations.

Interestingly, Kumar’s first language is not Tamil. His ancestors – traders from the arid Kutch region of Gujarat – had moved south over a century ago. His father, a businessman in Coimbatore, died young. As a teen, Kumar dropped out of school and held a string of jobs – mostly as a salesclerk – to contribute to his family’s finances.

In parallel, Kumar began his forays to Coimbatore’s Old Market, saving up money employers gave him for afternoon tea to buy popular magazines from second-hand bookstores. Early on, he stumbled on the powerful writing of Tamil author Jayakanthan whose protagonists were the working poor mostly. Kumar was stunned to see people not unlike himself on the printed page.

He discovered the Russian masters through Tamil translations and read American novelists in English, along with medieval English classics and modern poetry. When his reputation as a reader grew, occasionally books found him. A friend who cleared out his brother’s collection had books to give away. “It could’ve been Harold Robbins, but it was the philosopher J Krishnamurthy’s works,” said Kumar. Such eclectic reading expanded his worldview.

One day, at the tea kiosk, Kumar found a little magazine edited by the star author Jayakanthan. This was a literary periodical, not a glossy for the masses. It was priced higher, which meant Kumar had to forgo more cups of tea than usual to buy the issue, but it introduced him to the work of other serious writers in Tamil. It helped him find his tribe. Eventually, Kumar started sending stories to little magazines himself. (When he spoke of this key episode to Jayakanthan decades later, the latter said dismissively, “You could’ve watched a movie instead.”)

On to Chennai

Back in the 1970s, for anyone with literary ambitions in Tamil, Chennai was the place to be. When Kumar visited from Coimbatore, looking for jobs, he’d stay with his maternal uncle who lived not too far from the city’s iconic Central Station. The neighborhood was called Sowcarpet, a North Indian enclave in Chennai. Kumar knew this place and its people well.

Sowcarpet, fairly unknown in literature, was the setting for Kumar’s story “Theervu,” which won Kumar The Best Tamil Short Story of the Year award in 1977. It depicts a mini-crisis in the life of the Gujaratis in a building complex– a mouse drowns in their apartment well – and how the matter is resolved. Though Kumar presents the people from the community just as they are, warts and all, it comes across as an endearing portrayal.

The prize money of Rs.300 did nothing to improve family’s financial situation, but soon a literature-loving chemistry professor showed up at the store where Kumar worked, asking to meet the award-winning writer. He told Kumar of Cre-A, an upcoming publishing house in Chennai, whose goal was to introduce Tamil readers to books that would widen their interests and address their concerns.

A literary career

At the age of 28, Kumar moved to Chennai with a job at Cre-A. The place had become an important cultural center in the city in the 1980s. Serious writers and modern artists gravitated there, as did people from theatre and serious cinema. “You can imagine how lucky I felt interacting with some of the best minds in the city,” said Kumar. In a decade-long apprenticeship, he learned the business of publishing, the art of translation. He translated Gujarati and Hindi works into Tamil, put together anthologies of revered Tamil writers, and blossomed as a writer himself.

Kumar who burst upon the literary scene with stereotype-busting characters from Sowcarpet writes with empathy of the marginalized elsewhere as well. His simple prose draws you into the inner lives of people you’d pay little attention to in real-life. And refreshingly, his characters are unapologetic about their physical desires: a widow with grown-up children who sleeps with a relative, the college student who experiments with lesbianism, or the 70-year-old foodie who also feasts his eyes on Playboy magazines.

When Kumar started his own bookstore in Chennai in 1990, he had a niche clientele. Some of the academics, who became good friends, invited him to speak on the topic of modern Tamil literature in the language department on campus. The first invitation came in 2000 from Professor George Hart of the University of California, Berkeley, the Padma Shri winner whose research established that Tamil is a classical language.

Last fall, Kumar was at the University of Texas in Austin to speak in a seminar about the difficult work of translation. But the harder job, one would think, is that of curation. A well-read person, who cares enough about the language, must decide what is worthy of being translated, of being better known. In the blurb to the anthology, The Tamil Story, renowned linguist David Shulman reminds us that we are lucky to have such sensitive connoisseurs as our guides to short Tamil prose.

Kumar’s most recent creative work is a play denouncing the rise of fundamentalism in India, but he remains a serious writer who refuses to take himself too seriously. In the past, he has poked fun at himself through characters in his stories, including a mouse, destined for death, who asks God to take the writer’s life instead. He writes so little, and his stories are read by so few, the sly creature reasons. “You would be doing a great service directly to modern Tamil literature, in addition to helping me,” she says.  “You need not worry that the three-thousand-year-old Tamil literature may see a decline if this man disappears from the scene.”

But the ancient tongue would be denied a small but significant addition to its corpus of good literature. The author with a distinctive voice — Tamil with a Gujarati accent if one is literal about it — could be writing more.

Read the story here. html

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Any archaeological find is twice-born. First: On the day the object is unearthed — it is brought to light, as it were. Second: when its mystery is unraveled—the how, when, and where—and the object is woven into the continuum of human history. Without this second birth, the first is incomplete, even irrelevant.

Pankaj Tandon, an economist-turned-numismatist from Boston University, has helped decipher the inscription on a centuries-old coin from ancient India — a finding could rewrite a key chapter in the history of ancient India. Coins are not passive relics; they are engraved arguments, which demand the same interpretive rigor as scripture or sculpture.

In 1851, a hoard of gold coins issued by kings from the Gupta dynasty was unearthed near the holy city of Varanasi, in northern India. The Guptas, who ruled from the 4th to 6th centuries AD, had ushered in the “Golden Age” of ancient India, a blossoming of the arts and sciences that produced the concept of zero, a heliocentric astronomy, and the Kama Sutra.

Gupta kings stamped their given names on the front of their coins and, on the back, an assumed name ending in “aditya,” or sun. On two of the coins in the hoard, scholars were able to read only the king’s assumed name—Prakasaditya, or splendor of the sun—but it seemed obvious that these, too, were Gupta coins. Few scholars disagreed. Without the given name, however, the mystery would remain for more than 160 years: Which Gupta king was Prakasaditya? When did he rule?

Tandon is a Boston University associate professor of economics by training and, by passion, a scholar of ancient coins—or numismatist. In 2010, Tandon, who specializes in coins of ancient India, which to numismatists includes what are today Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, set out to crack the puzzle of Prakasaditya. An Austrian numismatist Robert Göbl had speculated without substantive proof that Prakasaditya was a Hun, but most scholars had continued to regard the mystery king as a Gupta. Tandon began by scouring more than 60 images of the coin—additional specimens had been found over the years—but the coins had all been poorly made and not one image revealed the king’s given name.

Tandon spent the 2011–12 academic year in India on a Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, teaching microeconomics at St. Stephen’s College, his alma mater, in the Indian capital, New Delhi. On weekends, he made road trips to several government museums in the nearby state of Uttar Pradesh to examine coins. On a visit to the Lucknow State Museum, he was granted a rare, behind-the-scenes tour of an uncatalogued collection of dozens of Gupta coins. With no time for careful viewing, he hastily took pictures of the lot.

It wasn’t until he got home and sorted through the images that he realized that one of them was of the mystery coin. And here, at last, were all the letters he needed to read the king’s given name—Toramana.

Toramana was no Gupta. He was a Hun, an invader whose conquests in northern India were believed to have stopped well short of Varanasi. The coin told a different story: the invader had not skirted the Gupta heartland—he had ruled it. Could the Huns have been responsible for the decline of the Guptas, in the second half of the fifth century? Tandon has provided historians with fresh evidence.

Enthused by his find, Tandon returned to India in the winter of 2015–16 on another Fulbright-Nehru fellowship to pursue other numismatic questions. His work includes cataloging coins of the Guptas—and of their predecessors, the mighty Kushans—in the government museums in Uttar Pradesh, which have the largest collection of coins from these two dynasties after the British Museum in London, and the National Museum in New Delhi. Tandon has been invited to collect new information about the Kushan and Gupta coins for scholars in an updated print catalogue.

Numismatics plays an important role in understanding ancient Indian history, says Joe Cribb, former Keeper of Coins and Medals at the British Museum and renowned authority on ancient Indian coins. Here’s why: Surviving written texts that feature the ancient history of India were created as religious or literary texts. To reconstruct the past, says Cribb, historians look to other sources, such as archaeological finds and inscriptions on stone and metal. Coins offer another form of evidence, requiring similar care and expertise in the interpretation of engraved words, symbols, and images. “This is where a scholar like Pankaj comes in,” Cribb says, adding that the BU economist brings a rigorous scientific approach.

Tandon, who earned his PhD in economics at Harvard, corroborates his numismatic findings with information he gleans from historical texts, inscriptions, and even sculpture from old temples. He has published his research extensively in peer-reviewed numismatic journals. Cribb has invited Tandon to collaborate with him on a catalogue of Kushan coins for the British Museum. Tandon began collecting coins as an investment in the late 1990s, when India was poised for growth. “As an economist, I know that in developing countries, the price of historically important cultural memorabilia is relatively low,” he says. “As the country becomes wealthier, the value of such memorabilia skyrockets.”

Once he acquired a coin, Tandon wanted to learn everything he could about it. As he immersed himself in the study of ancient Indian coins over a decade, their value went up, just as he had predicted. What he hadn’t predicted was that he would evolve from a collector into a scholar.

“Indian coinage is perhaps the most fascinating in the world,” Tandon says. “There are all these outside influences—from ancient Greece, Rome, Persia, and China—and there is all the indigenous evolution [of the coins themselves] over 2,500 years.” Ancient Indian coins conjure up marketplaces along the Silk Road, the trade route that connected the East and West; conquerors and their traveling mints; wars; and lost kingdoms. They depict kings and deities and animals (Prakasaditya portrayed himself astride a horse, slaying a lion) and feature one or more scripts: Greek, the now-extinct Kharoshthi, and Brahmi, the mother of most modern Indian scripts. Early on, numbers were written using letters, and the system for writing dates varied across kingdoms. The seeming inscrutability of it all appealed to Tandon, who is a devotee of the New York Times crossword puzzle. He knew the Greek alphabet, and over time he taught himself to read Kharoshthi and Brahmi.

But how did an economist break into the world of coin research?

What Coins Tell Us About a Forgotten Dynasty

As a collector, his first major acquisition was from a hoard of coins found in Balochistan, in present-day Pakistan, that had been issued by kings called the Paratarajas, who ruled the all-but-unknown kingdom of Paradan. They had issued copper coins with legends in Kharoshthi, and silver coins with legends in Brahmi. By scrutinizing the images and legends, Tandon came up with the chronology of the 11 Paratarajas rulers who, in all likelihood, ruled from around 125 to 300 AD. “Pankaj’s paper on the Paratas is an excellent example of the diligence and intelligence of his numismatic work,” says Cribb.

Tandon put the small kingdom back on the map. Then he dug up clues to help make it a living, breathing world. As an economist, he was curious about the source of the kingdom’s wealth. Searching through historical documents, he concluded that the secret of its prosperity was international trade. One export was a lavender-like plant called nard, which grew in abundance in arid Balochistan and fetched a high price from the Romans, who prized nard for its perfumery.

In 225 AD, the coinage of the Paratas went from silver to copper, a sign of the kingdom’s declining fortunes. Around the same time, with civil war raging at home, Rome’s trade with India suffered. The Roman economy was the biggest in the world, just like the US today, and a recession in Rome must have led to recession in India, Tandon hypothesizes. “Globalization may not be the modern phenomenon we think it is,” he says, “though the term is a modern one.”

Curating a Museum

Though he considers himself primarily a scholar, Tandon still collects coins. “You need to hold a coin in your hands and look at it from various angles to study it to your complete satisfaction,” he says.

Too often, though, when individual collectors acquire coins, they pass from public view and are unavailable for scholarly study. Twelve years ago, in an effort to help remedy the problem, Tandon established an online, or virtual, museum, CoinIndia, which features high-resolution images of nearly 2,000 coins from the Indian subcontinent, spanning some 2,500 years. Upinder Singh, the head of the history department at the University of Delhi, calls the website “a wonderful, unparalleled resource on the history of Indian coinage.” The virtual museum transforms coins from static objects into shared knowledge, accessible to scholars, students, and curious minds around the world.

In this century, there appears to be a third birth for archaeological artifacts —when the object, digitized and contextualized, enters public memory.

 

Read here. html.

Antiochos I
Silver, c. 266 BC

History Lesson: Alexander the Great (c. 356–323 BC) conquered vast swathes of the inhabited world, marching east with his armies from Macedonia to India. After his death, Alexander’s general, Seleucos Nikator, ruled the conquered Asian territory and established the Seleucid Empire. The general was succeeded by his first son, Antiochos. This is the only early Seleucid coin to carry a date, says Tandon. It specifies the month Xandikos (March) and the year EI (15). The coin was minted in the city of Ai-Khanoum, in Bactria, a key province in the eastern part of the empire.

On the front of this coin is the customary portrait of King Antiochos. Most of the other Seleucid mints had begun replacing the earlier image of the head of a horse, on the back, with the god Apollo years earlier. With this coin, the Bactrian mint seems to have made the switch as well.

Something must have happened to prompt the issuing of a new coin, Tandon speculates.

If the year 15 represented the 15th year of Antiochos’s reign, says Tandon, the date is March 266 BC. In 267 BC, Antiochos had his eldest son, who had been his viceroy to the east, executed on suspicion of rebellion. This coin, Tandon speculates, may commemorate the new viceroy’s arrival in Ai-Khanoum. Since it was the custom for Seleucid kings to appoint their heir apparent as viceroy to the east, scholars assume the king’s younger son, Antiochos II, replaced his brother on that date.

Kanishka the Great
Gold, c. 127 AD

After Alexander the Great’s campaigns, Greek rule persisted in Bactria (modern Afghanistan and parts of Central Asia) through the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, founded around 250 BCE. These rulers minted coins with Greek inscriptions and maintained Greek-style governance. Around 130 BCE, the nomadic Yuezhi tribes displaced the Greco-Bactrians. One Yuezhi leader, Kujula Kadphises, later unified the tribes and founded the Kushan Empire around 30 CE.  The Kushans were a superpower of the ancient world, ruling a large part of India during the first and second centuries AD. Art and culture flourished under the Kushans and they were known for their beautiful gold coins.

Four and a half centuries after Alexander the Great’s arrival in India, Kushans still minted coins in the Greek style, with Greek inscriptions and icons of Greek gods. This early coin from Kanishka 1, the greatest Kushan of all, depicts the Greek lunar goddess Selene. Later, the king began putting local deities on his coins.

Tandon knows the Greek alphabet from his training in mathematics and can read the script on Kushan coins. On one coin he acquired early on, he read the legend—which includes the king’s name—and saw that an expert had ascribed the coin to the wrong king. Perhaps the expert didn’t have a specimen of the coin with a legible legend, Tandon says. His coin did. The king was Kanishka. Tandon published the correct finding.

Toramana
Gold, c. 460 AD

Unlike pennies from the US mint, ancient coins were struck by hand and so no two coins are identical. A specimen could easily be missing critical parts of the inscription—or legend—that would reveal who issued the coin and when. Numismatists often have to wait until a well-struck coin turns up before they can attempt to read what’s on it, says Tandon.

Coin scholars had studied various specimens of this coin for more than 160 years, but they were all so shoddily made that no one could read the king’s given name. On this specimen, which Tandon owns, it is hard to see that there is an inscription at all.

In 2010, Tandon began painstakingly tracking down pieces of the puzzle—an image with a missing letter here, another clue there. In 2012, on a visit to a closely guarded collection of ancient coins at a museum in northern India, he took a hasty photograph of what he realized only later was the mystery coin. It had the missing letters Tandon needed to identify the king as Toramana, a Hun.

P.S.

mere jeb me 5 futti cowdie be nahin hain aur mein 5 lakh ka sauda kar raha hun

Ever wondered about these “footi cowdie” dialogues in the Hindi movies? Apparently,  cowrie shells were used as coins in eastern India not too long ago. Learned this and more as I wrote this article about ancient Indian currency. Read about economist Tandon’s work. html.

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Today, Verma is one of the few people in the world qualified to drive a vehicle on Mars.

Verma majored in electrical engineering in India and came to the United States to study artificial intelligence. Captivated by the landing of the Sojourner Mars rover in 1997, she decided to apply her engineering skills to space exploration. She pursued a Ph.D. in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University and interned at NASA’s Ames Research Center. She also got her first taste of robotic exploration here on Earth by field‑testing a rover in South America’s Atacama Desert.

After graduating in 2005, Verma joined the intelligent systems division at Ames as a research scientist. Later, she moved to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), the command center for Mars rover missions. Her robotics expertise and field‑testing experience won her a chance to drive the Opportunity rover. She drove Opportunity for three years before transitioning to the nuclear‑powered Curiosity rover, which now prowls Mars, examining rocks to determine whether the planet is, or ever was, a suitable habitat for life.

Each day, before shutting down for the frigid Martian night, the rover “calls home,” Verma says. Besides relaying scientific data and images, it sends its precise coordinates. They are downloaded into simulation software Verma helped write, which allows drivers to plan the next day’s route and rehearse tricky maneuvers. Operators may even perform a dry run with a duplicate rover on a sandy replica of Mars in JPL’s Mars Yard. Then the full itinerary is beamed to Curiosity so it can set off purposefully each dawn.

For the first three months after landing, from 5 August to 5 November 2012, the team worked on Mars time. “I loved that we didn’t have to wait long after we uplinked our commands to see the results from Curiosity, and every sol (a Martian day), we were doing something we’d never done before,” Verma recalls.

Curiosity can scoop dirt, drill rock, and hand off samples to its onboard lab. While a sample is being analyzed, Curiosity is already en route to the next site. Verma helped write the code that lets Curiosity juggle these tasks. “We have to drive on to find newer things for the slew of instruments to analyze without compromising the rover hardware or the sample,” she says.

She loves her day‑to‑day responsibility for the machine. “You definitely don’t want to be the one who drove the rover off a cliff! But I find it energizing rather than stressful. You’re completely focused.”

Verma has not left research behind. One of her key goals is to give rovers greater autonomy. She is now working on a software upgrade that will let Curiosity live up to its name — autonomously selecting interesting rocks, stopping mid‑drive to take high‑resolution images or analyze a rock with its laser, without prompting from Earth.

Originally designed for a two‑year mission, Curiosity is still going strong and has already made many scientifically significant finds. “With every drive, we get to explore new terrain that no human has seen in this kind of detail,” Verma says.

Although human spacefaring has stalled, Verma insists the spirit of exploration is alive in space robots. “I am happy to be working in robotics, pushing the envelope on space exploration. We have reached Mars, our neighboring planet. We have only just begun.”

Read the entire article. vandi

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Priya Davidar grew up in picturesque Ooty, a town in southern India with the misty blue mountains of the Western Ghats, a biodiversity hotspot, as its backdrop. In the 1950s, the family lived in an isolated hillside bungalow, and the babysitter told the children ghost stories; Davidar mistook the hyena’s mating call for a wandering ghoul’s laughter. Today, she regrets that the four-legged monster of her childhood can no longer be heard in her hometown. As in the rest of the world, much of the wildlife has been poisoned, and the woods have been cleared to let the town grow.

“In a competition for space, other species are rapidly losing out to humans,” Davidar says. But she hasn’t been sitting around mourning the loss of flora and fauna in her backyard. For close to 3 decades, as an ecologist at Pondicherry University—not far from her hometown—she has been doing research that conservationists can use to combat the loss of biodiversity. It’s an issue worldwide, but it is especially pressing in a populous, developing country such as India.

Read more here. html. pdf.

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Noah Wilson-Rich began studying the health of honeybees as a graduate student at Tufts University in 2005. Growing up in Connecticut, he was not a nature-loving kid — he recalls being scared of “creepy-crawlies.” An undergraduate course in sociobiology, and a subsequent lab project, changed that. He became fascinated by eusocial insects—bees, ants, termites, and wasps—which live in colonies and share their colonies’ upkeep. He knew that communal living, while essential to the insects’ survival, also makes them vulnerable to infections. Then, when Wilson-Rich was a year into his graduate program, a mysterious ailment hit beehives across the United States. “Honeybees were disappearing in shockingly large numbers. Not dying—they were just gone from the hives,” he says. The phenomenon has been labeled colony collapse disorder (CCD).

Seven years later, no single underlying cause has been identified to explain the large-scale die-off of bees. A growing list of pathogens, parasites, and pesticides are prime suspects. “CCD, in fact, appears to be many syndromes rolled into one. Every time a victory is declared, another disease agent pops up and there are new battles to fight,” says Jay Evans of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland. Honeybees don’t just provide honey: They pollinate food crops. So, the spread of the disease has very important practical implications. Realizing this, Wilson-Rich threw himself into lab work.

Even a graduate student working on a pressing, real-world problem needs diversions. Noah Wilson-Rich went to the Topsfield agricultural fair, an annual event in Essex County, Massachusetts and was drawn to the Bee House with its observational hives. Local honey was on sale, and apiarists were on hand to talk about what they do. The young entomologist—whose knowledge about insects had so far come largely from textbooks—put his name on the sign-up sheet for a beekeeping course. Before long, he was a certified beekeeper.

Back at Tufts, in the lab of Philip Starks, Wilson-Rich was focused not directly on finding the cause of CCD, but on understanding how honeybee immunity works. A starting point was to develop methods to test bees’ immune function. Because the honeybee genome had just been sequenced, many investigators were using microarrays to look at gene-expression patterns in normal and infected bees. “However, if we look only at gene activation, it is possible to miss post-transcriptional or post-translational modifications,” Wilson-Rich says. So, he decided to test for the presence of specific compounds in the blood of bees.

To induce an immune response, he used a nylon filament as a needle. An ice cube served as the anesthetic. When the honey bee’s body is infected, its blood darkens with the same compound that darkens human skin. In bees, melanin production is triggered by the enzyme phenol oxidase (PO) via the formation of quinones that are toxic to pathogens. How dark the blood turns is a measure of the insect’s ability to mount an effective immune response, a relationship that has been documented in other invertebrates.

In the hive, bees have age-specific roles. Young adult “nurses” tend to the brood; older “foragers” procure food. Wilson-Rich’s data indicated that as bees age, the amount of protein in their blood goes down but the amount of PO goes up. Foragers exhibit greater PO activity, a potent defense that could be conferring herd immunity to the hive. With CCD, nurses prematurely turn into foragers without sufficient immunity; disease resistance of the colony drops and disastrous consequences follow. With his thesis adviser and an undergraduate student, he published his findings as first author in the Journal of Insect Physiology in 2008.

A nontraditional path

Like any good graduate student, Wilson-Rich attended academic conferences. He also went to meetings of beekeepers associations in New England. He noticed a disconnect. “At conferences, scientists were talking about CCD and ways to make bees healthy, while beekeepers were wondering why their bees were dying and what they could do to prevent that,” he says. “It was frustrating to see so little communication between these two groups.” He decided to become a link between scientists and beekeepers.

Counterintuitively, research showed that urban honey bees survive winters better than their country cousins do. They also yield more honey. Promoting beekeeping—in Boston—became Wilson-Rich’s new mission. He would coax Bostonians to install hives in backyards and on rooftops and decks. His own early aversion to insects helped him reassure clients who shared his fears. He figured out that he could install and maintain beehives and then help hive-owners harvest the honey. It had the makings of a modest business.

An alternative funding model

Wilson-Rich’s transition from academic scientist to private sector honeybee health researcher/entrepreneur happened in steps. In 2009, when he was at Tufts, he entered the Dow Chemical Company’s Sustainability Innovation Student Challenge. While he was infecting bees in the lab, it occurred to him that he could, perhaps, inoculate them with something fortifying so that they would not fall prey to CCD. For bees in a hive, he decided that an oral vaccine would be a viable alternative. He won a $10,000 award for his idea and filed a patent for his method to immunize honeybees. Buoyed by this success, he worked hard in the lab and continued to write papers.

By 2010, he thought he had enough publications to graduate—but his research adviser didn’t share this view. His defense date kept getting pushed back. A postdoc offer that he’d lined up was rescinded, he says. That same year, he entered Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s famous $100K entrepreneurship contest and won $2000 for his elevator pitch. At the end of the year, he defended his dissertation on “Genetic, individual, and group facilitation of disease resistance in honeybees (Apis mellifera) and two species of paper wasps (Polistes dominulus and P. fuscatus).”

Best Bees Company LLC was born on 1 January 2010. “It was based on a no-investor, no-inventory model,” he explains. He buys a new hive only after he sells the previous one. Today, he’s the chief scientific officer of the company he founded; he uses 100% the profits to research honeybee health. “This funding model has been going strong for over 3 years now, and in our 4th year we hope to be up to 200 hives sold and managed,” he says. Spread all over eastern Massachusetts, his clientele includes five-star hotels in downtown Boston and innkeepers on Cape Cod.

Right now, their revenue is generated by beehive sales and service, but they’re seeking other revenue streams. “We continue to apply for research grants through traditional funding sources like NSF [the National Science Foundation], NIH [the National Institutes of Health], USDA, and others,” he says, but so far none of those grants have come through. He is hopeful that someday the products from the company’s applied research projects could generate income for research—even salaries. Bee-business-generated funding remains modest, some tens of thousands of dollars each year.

Science in the lab and the field

This summer, Best Bees will field-test an antifungal vaccine, made from yeast sugar, along with a probiotic supplement for bees. They hope the vaccine will act against the fungal spore Nosema, a growing threat to hives in the United States and one of the parasites linked to CCD. Rick Reault, the president of the Middlesex County Beekeepers Association in Massachusetts, says that he wants the vaccine to work because local apiarists prefer to keep their practice organic. Plus, there are limited foraging areas for bees due to habitat loss—and the supplement could help bees’ overall health. “Both products have already passed the palatability test—a great thing for any oral medicine,” Wilson-Rich says.

Evans, of the USDA bee lab, says that if Wilson-Rich takes good notes and maintains controls, it will be interesting to see the data that come out of this experiment. Wilson-Rich says he is committed to the level of rigor that he learned in the lab of his Ph.D. adviser. Best Bees already has manuscripts in preparation, using original data and with author lists that include undergraduate student-interns.

Wilson-Rich, who loves being on stage, also accepts speaking engagements to spread the message of beekeeping. “I used to be a theater kid,” he says. “My first role was as a tree in a play.” Since his TED talk last year, he has received more outreach invitations. This winter, he was in Kenya as part of the Bees Without Borders program, which trains people from impoverished communities in the income-generating skill of beekeeping. He continues to sell and manage hives to keep his company’s operations growing. He is working on a book called The Bee, A Natural History, to be published by Ivy Press in the United Kingdom.

Like the proverbial subject of his studies, he stays busy. Wilson-Rich’s journey—from textbook entomology to urban hive management—embodies a shift in how knowledge is produced, shared, and sustained. It’s not just about saving bees. It’s about changing the ecosystem of science itself.

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