The Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) celebrated its 6th Foundation Day on Tuesday, March 20th, at the India Habitat centre in New Delhi. This year, the theme for the Foundation Day celebration was ‘Sustaining Innovation: A market driven pathway’. The event saw a participation from large number of dignitaries from the industry and academia, public and private sector, policy makers and national and international organizations.

How many times have you fed moneys by the roadside? Are you changing the behaviour of the monkey or is it manipulating your behaviour for food? New  study from Researchers at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment along with researchers from the National Institute of Advanced Sciences gives reasons to not feed the monkeys.

Researchers from Anna University, Chennai use a microwave-based remote sensing technique to assess changes in Kolkata’s land subsidence for the years 2003, 2007 and 2011. Their resuls indicate that the city might in fact be slowly sinking.

Professor Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary, Department of Science and Technology and Department of Biotechnology, India and Professor Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor, University of Cambridge,  along with other researchers from the University of Cambridge and from various Indian research institutions met today in New Delhi to formalise the launch of TIGR2ESS – an acronym for “Transforming India’s Green Revolution by Research and Empowerment for Sustainable food Supplies”.

Graphene is called the ‘wonder material’ due to its electrical and mechanical properties and is now evolving as an alternative to conventional energy storage devices like batteries and supercapacitors. Researchers from Institute of Nano Science and Technology (INST), Mohali, use peanut shells to manufacture high-quality graphene nanosheets.

Researchers from the Institute of Public Health (IPH), Bangalore, with the support of the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research of the World Health Organization, have assessed the quality of generic medicine and their branded equivalents in South India. Their results show that the quality of generic medicines from multiple sources was similar to that of the branded medicines.

Researchers from the Sharma Centre for Heritage Education, India, find stone tools in the sediments of Attirampakkam, a small town near Chennai which are dated to be 3,85,000-year-old. This finding gives us a new understanding for how and when human migration out of Africa might have taken place.

Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, look into the various ways in which our solid waste management woes can be solved. In their efforts integrated waste management appears as a solution that can help reduce the pollution caused due to open dumping.

A new study by researchers from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, has looked at how factors like, competition among banking firms and banking stability affect the economic growth of a nation.