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Saptarshi Paul is a PhD student at IIT Kanpur who worries about dislocations and disclinations on curved surfaces. These are defects that arise because of mismatches in rotation and translation. On curved surfaces, curvature interacts with the defects. And this has deeper technological implications. Inspiration: Defect-mediated Growth of Cell Wall in Bacteria All living things grow. A bud on a plant can grow into a flower, leaf, or shoot. An embryo in a mother’s womb grows in

Computer simulations detailing polymers at the level of atoms are shedding light on how these synthetic materials deform and bear loads. They are even providing clues to how bespoke polymers with surface and bulk properties targeted for specific applications can be designed from bottom-up. T he white, flimsy glass in which you were served the dark, flat cola at the last party you attended was made of a material called polystyrene foam, though, understandably, you could not ca

Millions of kilometres of pipelines carrying oil, gas and water criss-cross the face of the earth. Making sure that they are in good health requires robots that can crawl through their insides and check if the inner walls have defects. Prof. Bishakh Bhattacharya and his team have a low-cost solution. Its a PIG.

Shruthi Pandey, P Venkitanarayanan and Ishan Sharma are trying to understand the failure mechanism of ice laden with dirt when subjected to sudden, rapid and very large loads. Dirty ice is often the cement binding boulders that make up glacial dams holding huge volumes of water. Understanding how they fail is crucial to modelling ice dam bursts that are known to cause devastation in the high mountains.