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Curiosity-driven Research, Curd Rice & Pickle

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,...

Dilip Kumar, Improbable Tamil Anthologist

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...

A Numismatist of Note

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...

Curiosity Rover Driver

The first motorized vehicle that Vandi Verma ever operated was a tractor. “I must've been 11 years old at the time,” she told Science. During school vacations, she visited her grandparents in a village in central India. At their farm, her uncle let her take...

The Surveyor of Jungles

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...

Pollinating His Own Science

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...