When temperatures get low, close to absolute zero, some chemical reactions still occur at a much higher rate than classical chemistry says they should – in that extreme chill, quantum effects enter…

Figure 1 : Schematic illustrating key steps involved in colorimetric measurements using a smartphone [1]. Computers are an indispensable part of laboratories. However, arrival of powerful mobile…

If you, like me, are possessed with that gene that makes people eat the whole bag of chips (don't laugh - somewhere in that 100,000 words of ENCODE public relations blitzing, I saw it), there is good…

During London Olympics 2012, Google Knowledge Graph (Ref. 1)  proved to be very useful in knowing about various aspects of the games like player statistics, medal tally of countries, etc.…

I'm not much of a drinker, never have been. I have always assumed it was because I did competitive athletics until I was about 25, which means I was outside the age where you 'learn' to like the…

The world wastes 1.3 billion tons of food per year.  If only scientists could create a "biorefinery" that could change food waste into a key ingredient for making plastics, laundry detergents…

Drug discovery projects often require analysis and visualization of large number of chemical structures to identify new drug candidates. Growth of chemical databases (Ref. 1) has made millions of…

Organisms can be divided into autotrophs, which can synthesize their own food using inorganic minerals, and heterotrophs which require organic food.  Plants produce organic compounds from simple…

Viscous materials do not follow standard laws - below a sub-melting point threshold, anyway.  Glass-formers are a class of highly viscous liquid materials that have the consistency of honey and…

Even though arsenic is toxic for many organs in the human body, it is used in therapeutic medicine and the treatment of some forms of cancer, and is an active component of drugs against parasitic…