Today, the 10th of October, is celebrated as World Mental Health Day each year. This month, we will be publishing a series of articles focusing on the rapidly growing mental health crisis in academia, as well as the present status of awareness, research and policy on mental health in the Indian context. Please visit our website to follow this series, and let us know your thoughts and insights in the comments section. As always, we warmly welcome your ideas.
We will also be grateful if you can take out 5-10 minutes to fill out this survey on mental health support in Indian academia and share it with your friends and colleagues. We have received an overwhelming response so far and would love to hear from more regional universities and institutions.
Meanwhile, in September, we highlighted exciting research from all corners of the country. Scroll down to find out more about a fish apocalypse, stressed tigers, infectious proteins, anti-bleeding microparticles and more. We have also had a couple of insightful PhD Cafe articles about facing challenges and mentorship. If you are a STEM PhD student in India and would like to share your story or your learnings from graduate school, do get in touch with us. You can write to us anytime at hello@indiabioscience.org, or connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram.
And now, here are the stories we chased in September.
In an attempt to re-invent the college biology textbook, iBiology has launched The Explorer’s Guide to Biology (XBio for short), which focuses on stories of scientific discovery and is free-of-charge. XBio is spearheaded by Ron Vale (UCSF), who is one of the founders of IndiaBioscience, working in close collaboration with TNQ Technologies in Chennai. Written by Nobel Prize winners and other distinguished scientists, XBio is a bold re-imagining of the biology textbook for the 21st century.
Café Oikos, a volunteer-driven, not-for-profit initiative, is the brainchild of engineer-turned-ecologists Anisha Jayadevan and Shishir Rao. It is a free and open public event regularly held at Bengaluru bookstores or cafés wherein people from all walks of life can come to learn about ecology and conservation research directly from active scientists.
Zill e Anam is a PhD student at the Special Centre for Molecular Medicine, Jawaharlal Nehru University. In this next article in our PhD Cafe series, she discusses some of the speed-breakers in her journey, solutions that helped her, and what she learned from each episode.
Parul Anup recently completed her PhD from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. In this next article in our PhD Cafe series, she talks about the expectations that graduate students and Principal Investigators (PIs) have from each other, and how keeping these in mind can help in building a healthy mentor-mentee relationship.
While wildlife tourism serves as a revenue source for conservation efforts, it may have unintended consequences on the well-being of endangered mammal species. A new study reveals that tiger populations in protected areas experience elevated stress levels during the tourism season, which can negatively affect their health and reproduction.
Researchers from the Centre for Climate Studies, Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, have discovered that the accumulation of chromium (a heavy metal) and low salinity might have caused mass death of fish in the Adyar estuary in Tamil Nadu in 2017.
Uncontrolled blood loss following an accident or injury can pose severe risks to the health and life of the patient. Now, a team of Indian researchers from the Institute of Nano Science and Technology have developed a novel environment-friendly microparticle which can stop bleeding quickly if applied to the injury site.
Researchers at the National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru have used a combination of techniques to unravel the mystery of how prions misfold. Prions are proteins that undergo structural changes to form compound assemblies called amyloid fibrils, which can lead to fatal infectious neurodegenerative diseases like the Mad Cow disease and other Transmissible Spongiform Encelopathies in mammals.
A team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru have come up with a computational model to explain why different people respond differently to viral infections. According to this model, a delicate balance between specific immune cells and viral antigens determines infection outcome.
