My Science School

Debdeep Mukhopadhyay is a cryptographer and Computer Science professor at IIT, Kharagpur. He is interested in Hardware security, Cryptographic Engineering, Design Automation of Crypto- systems, and VLSI of Crypto- systems.

Mukhopadhyay was born on 31st October, 1977 in Howrah, a twin town of Kolkata. He was interested in computers from a young age and was inspired by his father, himself a computer professional. He was a student of IIT Kharagpur from his graduation till Ph.D. His Ph.D. thesis won the Techno-Inventor Award (for the best Ph.D.), from the Indian Semi- conductors Association in 2008.

He worked at IIT, Madras as Assistant Professor from 2007-8. Then he again joined his alma mater in 2008 and is a professor in the Department of Computer Science. He has worked as visiting faculty at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and New York University Shanghai, China. He was also a visiting scientist at the CYSREN, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Debdeep won the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar prize for his contribution to cryptographic engineering in 2021.

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Dr. Sunil Mukhi is an Indian theoretical physicist who has greatly contributed to the string theory and the quantum field theory. We have already dealt with the string theory. The quantum field theory studies the behaviour of subatomic particles in different kinds of force fields.

Dr Mukhi took a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1981. Then he did postdoctoral studies at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, in Trieste, Italy. He came back to India and joined the Theoretical Physics Group at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai in 1993.

He joined as head of the Physics department of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune in 2012. He rose to become the Dean after 7 years.

He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, and the Indian National Science Academy. He has received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award for Physical Sciences, 1999, and the J.C. Bose Fellowship, 2008. He was named a Fellow of TWAS, (The World Academy of Sciences) in October 2014.

He is also the editor of the Journal of High Energy Physics since its start.

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Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, an Indian by birth, is a British structural biologist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry along with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath in 2009, for his research into the atomic structure and function of ribosomes. Ribosomes are tiny particles made up of RNA and proteins.

Ramakrishnan was born in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu. Both his parents were scientists. He graduated from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda after getting the National Science Talent Scholarship. Then he moved to the U.S. Although Dr. Ramakrishnan started with a career in theoretical physics, he later moved towards molecular biology.

He did his postdoctoral research at Yale University and joined as biophysicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Afterwards he joined the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge in England. The next year, he published a series of ground- breaking scientific papers.

Dr. Ramakrishnan was elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2004. He was elected a foreign member of the Indian National Science Academy in 2008. Our country then honoured him with the Padma Vibhushan in 2010, and he was knighted by the U.K government in 2012. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2003 and later became the society's first Indian-born president.

He has a dual citizenship of the U.S.A and the United Kingdom.

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Arun Kumar Shukla is a famous structural biologist, who rose to fame with his study on G protein-coupled receptors (GPCR). GPCR are proteins which are permanently attached to the cell membranes. These respond to sensory or other stimuli from outside the cells and also physiologically respond to hormones.

Shukla's team of scientists at IIT, Kanpur designed nanomachines which target certain signalling events. Several marketed drugs work with the use of these techniques.

Dr. Arun Kumar Shukla was born on 01 November 1981 in Kushinagar in Uttar Pradesh. He did his PG degree in biotechnology from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Then he did his doctoral studies under the guidance of Hartmut Michel (Nobel Laureate,1988) of the Max Planck Institute of Bio- physics, Germany.

He started his career at the prestigious Duke University as an assistant professor at their department of medicine. He came back to India and joined the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK) at the Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering (BSBE). He is a professor and heads the Laboratory of GPCR Biology.

Let us have a look at the many awards that Dr. Shukla received.

• National Bioscience Award for Career Development, 2017-18.
• 2021 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in Biological Science.
• B.M. Birla Science Prize (2017),
• NASI-Young Scientist Platinum Jubilee Award of the National Academy of Sciences, India (2016),
• CDRI Award (2018),
• Shakuntala Amir Chand Prize of the Indian Council for Medical Research (2018)
• EMBO Young Investigator Award (2017).

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Professor Pulickel Ajayan who hails from Kerala can be called a wizard in the field of nanotechnology. He is armed with the darkest material and the smallest brush. He got into the Guinness Book of World Records twice for these.

The darkest material is out of the wizard book literally - a carpet that reflects only 0.045 per cent of light. It's made of carbon nano-tubes.

Have you heard about the paper battery? This was also the creation of this Professor from Rice University, Houston. The paper battery grabbed the limelight in August 2007. This is basically an energy storage device on a piece of paper.

Pulickel Ajayan has 400 papers on carbon nanostructures. He is concerned about the environment and in 2012, came up with a hybrid material which could remove contaminants from water. He also developed a green battery made of lithium-ion cathode which is environment friendly.

He is currently working on how nanotechnology can be effectively used for energy storage devices.

Prof. Ajayan has won several awards and is on the advisory editorial board of several leading journals. He is also a board member of many nanotechnology companies. He is a visiting professor in many international universities too.

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Prof. C.N.R. Rao is a world-famous Indian scientist specialising in solid state and structural chemistry.

He did research in superconductivity, and his latest research is on the wonder material graphene and artificial photosynthesis.

Prof. Rao was a single child. His father was an Inspector of Schools, but surprisingly, he did not go to elementary school. He was coached at home by his mother. His parents saw to it that he was fluent in both English and his mother-tongue, Kannada.

Rao's passion for chemistry started during his high school years and he chose Chemistry for his higher studies, and went to the Banaras Hindu University for his Master's. Later, he got scholarship offers to do Ph.D. from four foreign universities: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Penn State, Columbia and Purdue. He went to Purdue and completed his Ph.D in 2 years and nine months in 1958. He was only 24!

84 universities have given him honorary doctorates. He has 54 books and around 1,774 research publications.

He is the founder president of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore, and was the chairman of the science advisory council to the prime minister for many years. He is also Founding Fellow of the Third World Academy of Sciences.

Now, have a look at some of the awards and honours received by this great man:

• Marlow Medal
• Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology
• Hughes Medal
• India Science Award
• Dan David Prize
• Royal Medal
• Von Hippel Award
• ENI award
• Padma Shri
• Padma Vibhushan

On 16 November 2013, the Government of India selected him for Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian award in India. Thus he became the third scientist after C.V. Raman and APJ. Abdul Kalam to receive the Bharat Ratna.

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Amit Singh is a famous Indian microbiologist. An associate professor at the department of microbiology and cell biology of the Indian Institute of Science, he studied how Mycobacterium causes tuberculosis and is well known for this.

Amit Singh was born on 18 March 1976. After graduating in science from the University of Delhi, he joined IIT, Roorkee for his Master's degree in biotechnology. He received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of Delhi and went to the U.S for post-doctoral studies.

He came back to India in 2010 and joined the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology as a Wellcome Trust-DBT intermediate fellow. After four years, he joined the IISc, Bangalore where he is working now.

He is the head of the Centre for Infectious Disease Research. Research is done there on tuberculosis, AIDS and other chronic or long-lasting not infections.

He has received many prestigious awards. You can specially note these two:

• National Bioscience Award for Career Development - 2017-18

• CSIR- Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award-2021 (for bio-scientific research).

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ASTEROIDS

Asteroids are small, mostly rocky, irregular-shaped bodies. They are found orbiting the Sun in a band filling the 550-million-kilometre gap between Mars and Jupiter. The largest, Ceres, measures just under 1000 kilometres across, but only a handful have diameters greater than 100 kilometres. About 4000 have been recorded, but there are many thousands more too small to be identified.

Astronomers believe that, during the formation of the Solar System, Jupiter’s strong gravitational pull caused nearby planetesimals to smash into one another rather than build up into another planet. This left the belt of fragments we call the asteroids.

The asteroids have continued to collide with one another since their formation, producing smaller fragments called meteoroids. These have occasionally crashed on to Earth’s surface (when they are known as meteorites). It is feared that one day a large meteorite may devastate Earth, causing climatic change sufficient to wipe out many life-forms.

            Most asteroids are rocky, indicating they come from the outer layers of a former minor planet. But some are metallic – they come from the core of such a planet.

            A close-up view of the irregular shaped objects that make up the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. From study of asteroid fragments that have fallen to Earth, scientists have dated the age of the Solar System to 4.6 million years ago.

COMETS

Comets are potato-shaped lumps of dust measuring only a few kilometres across, but accompanied by (when near the Sun) tails of has or dust that stretch for hundreds of millions of kilometres across space. The lump of dust is fused together by frozen gases and water ice. Like all other objects in the Solar System, comets orbit the Sun, although their orbits are often very elliptical (elongated ovals), looping in towards the Sun from distant reaches of the Solar System. When a comet approaches the Sun, part of its ices melt and the gas and dust escape, forming a surrounding cloud, or coma. As it rounds the Sun, the coma is swept back into two tails, a straight gas tail and a broader, curved dust tail, always pointing away from the Sun.

Sometimes, small pieces of debris break off from comets. Great showers of these fragments, called meteors, sometimes come quite close to Earth. Millions of tiny particles burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. Commonly known as shooting stars, they appear to us as split-second streaks of light in the night sky.

FAMOUS COMETS

The English astronomer Edmund Halley (1656-1742) was the first to realise that comets were orbiting objects. He once made a famous prediction: a comet that he observed in 1682 would return to the skies in 1758. Halley believed that comets recorded in 1531 and 1607 were simply earlier sightings of the one he saw in 1682. Halley did not live to see his prediction come true. Halley’s Comet, as it has been known ever since, was duly sighted on Christmas Day 1758 and has reappeared every 75 to 76 years. When Halley’s Comet appeared in March 1986, the space probe Giotto flew within 600 kilometres of it, sending back pictures and sampling the gases and dust particles given off by it.

A sighting of a comet is always a great event. The 1997 appearance of Comet Hale-Bopp was the most spectacular of recent years. Comets can also be destructive if they pass too close to a planet. In July 1994, drawn in by gravity, fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy smashed into Jupiter, creating massive fireballs on impact.

            On 30th June 1908 there was a huge explosion in the Tunguska region of Siberia, Russia. Trees in an area about 100 km across were felled by the blast, but no crater was found. The Tunguska fireball may have been a comet exploding at an altitude of about 6 km.

MOONS

Moons, also known as satellites, are relatively small worlds that orbit the planets of the Solar System. Earth has one moon, known simply as the Moon, but other planets have many more - Saturn, for example, has at least 18 moons. Moons are very varied in size and form. Many have unusual landscape features that intrigue astronomers.

Moons are created in different ways. Some are the result of fragments of rock or ice being pulled together by gravity to form a globe. Others are asteroids that have been “captured” by a planet’s gravitational force.

All seven of the moons illustrated here larger than the smallest planet, Pluto, while the largest moons, Ganymede and Titan, are even bigger than Mercury, the second smallest planet. Jupiter’s four largest moons are all in the top seven. They are called the “Galileans” after the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei who first discovered them with one of the first telescopes in 1610. Ganymede has an icy surface with cratered plains and areas showing strange “grooved” patterns.

Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is the only moon to have a thick atmosphere, made mainly of nitrogen. Beneath its continuous cloud layer, there may be a sea of methane.

Callisto, Jupiter’s second largest moon, is heavily cratered. Measuring 600 kilometres across, its most prominent crater, called Valhalla, is surrounded by a series of ripples. Io, the third of Jupiter’s Galileans, with its crust a vivid mixture of yellows, oranges, reds and blacks, looks a little like a pizza. In fact it is peppered with active volcanoes and lakes of molten rock.

Our own Moon is the fifth largest moon in the Solar System, although it would take 81 Moons to make up a world the size of Earth. The Moon’s lava plains indicate past volcanic activity, but there are no active volcanoes there today.

Next in order of size comes Europa, the fourth Galilean and an object of great interest amongst astronomers. Looking like a cracked egg, its surface consists of ice sheets that are continually melting and re-solidifying. It is by no means impossible that, beneath those ice sheets, there is a warm ocean of liquid water. Could it be that life has also evolved on Europa and that there are life-forms swimming in its oceans? Future space probe missions may find out.

Triton is Neptune’s largest moon. Its surface is the coldest place known in the Solar System. At -235°C, the temperature is low enough to freeze nitrogen. Triton was photographed in stunning detail by Voyager 2, the last of its close encounters, in 1989.

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PLUTO

Pluto is the smallest, coldest and outermost planet in the Solar System. It was the last to be discovered, identified in 1930 by the American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh. He compared photographs of part of the sky taken six days apart and noticed that a pinprick of light had moved slightly against the background of stars. Pluto was the only outer planet not visited by Voyager 2, so astronomers still know little about it. Some even propose that Pluto is really a comet and not a planet at all.

Pluto has a very elongated orbit, ranging between 7400 and 4400 million kilometres from the Sun, bringing it inside the orbit of Neptune for part of the journey. Pluto’s moon, Charon, is just over half its size and lies only 19,640 kilometres away from it. Both spin in a direction opposite to that of the other planets except Venus.

Pluto is denser than the icy moons of Uranus and Neptune, suggesting that it has relatively large, rocky core.

Pluto’s surface is probably an “icescape” of frozen nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane. There may be craters made by collisions with rock and ice fragments. Seen from Pluto, the Sun looks no more than a bright, distant star. It still provides just enough heat to evaporate some of the surface frost and create an extremely thin atmosphere. Charon, Pluto’s nearby moon, features prominently in the sky.

Thousands of icy objects may exist in the outer reaches of the Solar System. They may form either a belt or a cloud. This could be the birthplace of comets.

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NEPTUNE

Neptune was discovered by German astronomer Johann Galle in 1846. Its largest moon, Triton, was recorded a few days later. Besides that, very little was known about Neptune until the space probe Voyager 2 visited it in 1989.

A bright blue globe, Neptune almost completely lacks surface features. At the time it was photographed by Voyager, a storm system, called the Great Dark Spot (which later disappeared), could be seen racing in a direction opposite to the planet’s rotation. Winds on Neptune blow at more than 2000 kilometres per hour.

Like the other gas giants, Neptune has a system of rings. There are four extremely faint rings, composed of dark, icy fragments.

VOYAGER 2

The greatest journey by a space probe so far undertaken was made by Voyager 2. Between 1979 and 1989, it flew close by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, transmitting superbly clear pictures of the planets and their moons. Voyager has since sped away from the Solar System, although it continues to send back signals - 20 billion times weaker than those of a watch battery!

Voyager is playing its part in the search for life in other solar systems. Should aliens ever come across the space probe they will find an audiovisual disc on board. If they play it, they will hear, among other things, the sounds of whales, baby crying and greetings in 55 languages.

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URANUS

Uranus was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel, an amateur German astronomer living in England. More recently, astronomers found that Uranus is tilted 98° from the vertical, meaning that it orbits the Sun almost on its side. So for much of the 84-year-long journey, both poles face long periods of continuous daylight, followed by continuous night.

            Uranus’ relatively small, rocky core is surrounded by a slushy ocean of water with some ammonia. Its thick atmosphere is composed mainly of hydrogen.

            Uranus has a family of 11 faint rings, none more than 10 km wide, each made up of pitch-black blocks, measuring only a few metres deep. They circle Uranus’ equator.

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MARS

Although Mars is much smaller than Earth, the two planets have a number of similarities. The Martian day is only a little longer than ours and its angle of tilt means that Mars has four seasons, just as we do on Earth. Daytime temperatures at the equator in midsummer can sometimes reach 25°C. Thin clouds of water vapour or early morning surface frosts can also sometimes be seen. Like Earth, Mars has volcanoes, mountains, dried-up river beds, canyons, deserts and polar icecaps.

For these reasons, Mars is thought to be the only other planet where life may once have existed. However, analysis of the Martian soil by space probes Viking 1 and 2, which touched down on the planet in 1976, and Pathfinder in 1997, failed to find any sign of past or present life.

Mars is a barren planet. Its reddish colour comes from iron oxide dust (similar to rust). From time to time, large dark regions appear on the surface. These are areas of bare rock, exposed when storms remove the dusty covering. The Martian landscape features some dramatic landforms. The Solar System’s highest mountains and its deepest canyon, Valles Marineris, are found on Mars.

Mars has quite a low density and a very weak magnetic field. This suggests that it has only a relatively small ball of iron at its core.

 A number of valleys and channels have been carved into the Martian plains. From the evidence of sediments – muds and silts deposited by water – it seems likely that there were once rivers, lakes and even seas on Mars. The only water left on the surface today is frozen in the polar icecaps. The rest may have been lost to space due to Mar’s weak gravity, or hidden from view as a deep-frozen layer beneath the surface.

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MOON

The moon is neither a star nor a planet. It is a ball of rock that travels around Earth, taking about 27 days to complete the circle. It is the brightest object in the night sky, although the light it “shines” is reflected from the Sun.

The Moon may have formed when a large object or planetesimal collided with the newly-formed Earth more than four billion years ago. The impact “splashed” into space vast amounts of debris that later came together to form the Moon.

            A completely barren world, the Moon’s surface consists of cratered highlands and wide plains. The Moon’s internal structure is similar to Earth’s; its crust is thicker and not divided into tectonic plates.

            With neither air nor liquid water, it is impossible for plants or animals to live on the Moon. The barren lunar landscape is pitted with craters, blasted out by meteorites crashing to its surface. Scattered debris has left streaks radiating from some craters. The Moon also has wide, smooth lava plains. Early astronomers thought these were seas. They are still called by the Latin name for sea, mare.

PHASES OF THE MOON

The shape of the Moon appears to change from one night to the next. This happens because, as it travels round Earth, it spins only once, so the same face remains pointed towards us at all times. It is our view of the sunlit part that changes. When the face pointed towards us is turned away from the Sun, we cannot see the Moon at all: a New Moon (1).When it is turned towards the Sun, we see a complete disc: a Full Moon (5). In between, it passes through crescent (2), quarter (3) and gibbous (4) phases, and back again (6-8).

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