The best of Indian science

Indian lasers among the world's best The Centre for Advanced Technology in Indore is playing a pivotal role in the indigenisation of lasers and making them easily available.

A ray of hope for leprosy patients

LEPROSY afflicts about 12 million people worldwide, of which about a third are in India.

Speeding up in the fast lane

Molecules made to order

TWO CHEMISTS in Hyderabad, working separately, have synthesised many complex organic molecules (those containing carbon) that are the basic constituent of most drugs. The chemistry of carbon is essential to understand the basis of all life, as most biological processes are mediated by organic compounds.

Power for the future

MOST OF us are familiar with only three states of matter -- solid, liquid and gas. But there is another form of matter -- plasma -- that is neither solid, liquid nor gas. Plasma is composed of charged particles -- electrons and ions -- whereas other matter consists of neutral atoms.

Exotic denizens of the particle zoo

CAN WE unravel the composition of all objects -- both living and non-living -- as just an interplay of a handful of particles? Since time immemorial, humans have tried to make sense of their complex world by assuming a fundamental, underlying simplicity of structure.

The halo is hotter than the star

HEAT ALWAYS flows from a hotter body to a cooler one, according to the second law of thermodynamics. But then why is the Sun's atmosphere hotter, by several million degrees, than its surface where all the energy is generated? Astrophysicist Jack Scudder has furnished an ingenious mechanism to explain how the transfer of heat takes place without violating thermodynamics (Nature, Vol 361, No 6414).

Cosmic radiations originate in earth's galaxy

AN AMERICAN satellite has provided firm evidence that cosmic rays -- showers of energised particles from space that bombard the earth from all directions -- are produced within earth's own galaxy -- the Milky Way.

A fitting answer to anthropocentrism

ONE OF the most remarkable and exciting developments in physics has been the interaction between particle physics and cosmology. Remarkable, because it combines the study of the very small, namely, particle physics, with the study of the very large, namely, cosmology. Exciting, because each is contributing immensely towards answering fundamental questions in the other.

Elusive top quark

PARTICLE physicists at Fermilab near Chicago may have sighted the elusive "top" quark, one of the smallest constituents of matter (Science, Vol 258, No 5086; New Scientist, Vol 136, No 1851). An experiment at the Tevatron collider -a large particle smasher -yielded a pattern of particle debris that was anticipated when a bigger particle breaks down. When a proton and anti-proton collide, a top quark and an anti-top quark form and then decay into other particles. The "top" is one of six types of quarks believed to exist and the only