Episode 25: Best of "I am a scientist and this is where I work"

(Lightly edited for readability)

Speakers: Subhra Priyadarshini, Aroma Warsi, Sarita Ahlawat, Manjari Jain, Shoba S Meera, Sujit Ghosh, Dorje Angchuk, Abi Tamim Vanak, Ramanathan Baskar, Sushmitha Baskar

00:01 Sponsor announcement: This episode is produced with support from DBT Wellcome Trust India Alliance.

00:25 Subhra Priyadarshini: At Nature India podcast, we have had a lot of fun in the last few months bringing to you some wonderful stories from very interesting and unusual workplaces of Indian scientists. We got a peek into their daily lives and walked with them as they graciously took us through their passionate and sometimes deeply emotional stories.

Today’s episode is a wrap-up of sorts of this season of “I am a Scientist and this is where I work”, a series we will miss producing for you immensely. In nine episodes of this popular series, we hope we have been able to demystify the lives of scientists, even if a wee bit.

The public perception of science is a tad clichéd, isn’t it? Test tubes, rockets, smelly labs, old men in their experiments. That’s the perception, but that perception is changing fast and we hope we did our bit to clear some air around that.

In this podcast series, we shadowed scientists working in unusual and unique settings – in various disciplines of science, in so many different landscapes – from caves to tree canopies, from oceans to the Himalayas, from a drone lab to a baby speech lab, from wildlife sanctuaries to the deep recesses of the human brain.

I am Subhra Priydarashini and I’ve loved producing this series with Aroma Warsi and we are reminiscing today about the fantastic run this series has had in the last 9 months, the kind of love our audiences have showered on us is truly humbling..

02: 05 Aroma Warsi: Absolutely Subhra! How different has this experience been! So enriching. For instance, think of the time we were at the drone lab in Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, with Sarita Ahlawat and her drones. We learnt how the little flying machines go from the lab to the skies, in perfect synchrony. Her workplace, quite literally buzzed with ideas and cutting-edge technology.

02:31 Sarita Ahlawat: Very soon, you will hear a drone buzzing around me. So one constant noise that you hear in our lab is the drone, small drones flying. They're testing them, calibrating them, getting them ready for the flight. I have two teams in the lab. And so please don't mind the noise that is around me. One of the drones is now flying near me and what my colleagues here is doing is calibrating the system and qualifying it for the flight.

02:56 Aroma Warsi: Sheer energy and excitement, and passion. Sarita has had many successful drone shows since we spoke to her on our podcast. Now, these are high octane drone swarm shows creating breathtaking images in the night sky, and these have to adhere to the highest standards of security.

03:17 Sarita Ahlawat: So we do not take chance. So what we have done as a security precaution, and it has taken us one year of coding, so we do something called geo fencing. So we create a fence on each drone will stay only in a defined area. So let's say I'm making a formation in Rashtrapati Bhavan – I do not want my drone to cross and go meet the Prime Minister, because then I will have a lot of trouble. So what we did is, we created a geofence. And so if the drone's, let's say, some sensor has gone off, and now the drone is not listening to any of the commands that we have put in, once it crosses the geofence code, it will commit a suicide, it will fall as soon as it's time to cross the geofence.

4:12 Subhra Priyadarshini: How interesting! This series has been all about ambient noises, no? Helping us get the feel of these workplaces. Like when we travelled with behavioural ecologist Manjari Jain form IISER Mohali trying to understand how birds communicate inside a noisy jungle.

04:30 Manjari Jain: When I entered the forest, it was just so noisy there was a cacophony of sounds. My heart sank. But your senses with respect to what you can hear, you're overloaded there. And I could hear crickets and frogs and all kinds of eerie sounds everywhere. And there were calls of civets and lorises, which sound like someone is shrieking inside the forest which all, you know, relate to the very conventional notion of forest being an extremely dangerous place. I would get extremely scared listening to some kinds of sounds. But with some practice, and with time in the forest, I got used to what each of these forests sounds actually mean.

05:23 Subhra Priyadarshini: Some might find these sounds petrifying but for Manjari there’s method in this madness – to her, the cacophony offers important clues on Avian communication.

05:34 Aroma Warsi: And talking of communication, what could be more complex than to decipher the language of a small child with communication difficulties? Remember when we spoke to Shoba S. Meera, the speech-language pathologist at NIMHANS Bengaluru who works with such babies? She opened up her colourful and musical lab, full of toys and songs, for us to understand how parents of autistic children decode their language better.

06:05 Shoba S Meera: So our labs are really very beautiful. They have nice, very very nice space to use, very interesting cartoons painted, it's very nice and very vibrant. Several times, they bring back childhood memories to all of us who work there. If somebody just walks in, they will find toys, anything that you think of the child can play with. But actually, there is so much science there, every toy there is actually a tool through which we evaluate a child's ability to understand, the child's ability to manipulate, the child's ability to build on it. So that's one of the things. The second thing we do is to record the child's natural environment. So we have a recorder, which once switched on will record the entire 16 hours of the baby, wherever the baby goes, whatever the baby hears, whatever the baby does. So once the record is returned to us, we then connect it to the computer, which has a specialised program and it's called the LENA device and the LENA software. Once we connect the recorder to the programme, the programme gives us automatic counts of how many words the child has heard, or how many words the parents talk, how many times the parents spoke and the child returned a response so that it also gives us a count of how many times this to and fro activity happened. And that's called conversational turns. So we don't have large MRI equipments or big test hoods or test tubes. But we surely have these very tiny recorders for our tiny humans, but it's very powerful and gives us so much insight.

07:35 Subhra Priyadarshini: Yes, yes such a cute episode, with baby babble throughout. This one was clearly one of my absolute favourites. And from analysing the brain to diving deep into the oceans. We had Sujit Ghosh from IISER Pune, sharing his unique story of recovering from an unusual source – sea water – a record haul of uranium, the chemical that powers nuclear reactors and therefore is great news for an energy-deficient planet.

08:04 Sujit Ghosh: Uranium will collected there. The way until scientists applied for this application -- we can put the material in fiber and with a long thread we can dip it in the sea for a few months and then uranium will get collected. Then we can extract after few months and the uranium can be collected again and again. Okay, that means we can reuse it. Another way we can do it is near the sea, we can pump a lot of water and pass through this material and it can capture uranium from seawater. I'm very hopeful that this technology will work one day in real application. Then we can solve the problem of power by generating unlimited power using uranium as a nuclear fuel from seawater.

08:47 Aroma Warsi: Although English is the prominent language of science in India, some scientists we interviewed were equally at ease with communicating their science in Hindi. I was especially impressed by engineer and astrophotographer Dorje Angchuk, who opened up his observatory up in the higher altitudes of Leh. Dorje is an integral part of the Indian Astronomical Observatory in Hanle, and took us on a magical journey of beautiful landscapes and serene night skies with his pictures.

09:20 Dorje Angchuk: Speaking in Hindi about the Hanle observatory and astrophotography.

10:09 Subhra Priyadarshini: And Abi Tamim Vanak, animal ecologist and conservation biologist, spoke about his research on interactions between domestic animals, wildlife and humans. Abi, in fact, reasoned some of his controversial remarks on why we shouldn’t feed dogs or plant trees without much thought.

10:29 Abi Tamim Vanak: Speaking in Hindi about human-animal relationship and savanna ecosystems.

12:07 Aroma Warsi: All these scientists had such diverse and interesting workplaces. But none scarier than the Baskars – cave geomicrobiologists. Sushmitha and Ramanathan Baskar – the couple exploring subterranean caves to look for signatures that might help better define the earth's past and future – actually set out some really neat couple goals for scientist couples.

12:33 Ramanathan Baskar: It provides us moral and professional support, and it boosts both of us professionally. And then if you have your spouse as your coworker, then she will be honest with you, and she knows your strengths and limitations. She can criticize you, two heads are better than one. And we use the power of teamwork to put larger ideas into action. No doubt, throughout the journey, it is friendship and companionship. In fact, I am reminded of Henry Ford's quote: Coming together is beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success. Of course, there are some disadvantages in the sense that you need to set boundaries at work as well as at home, then you need to prioritize your tasks and divide them so that no partner is overburdened because of the work.

13:28 Sushmitha Baskar: Sometimes when we are writing a paper, it goes up even up to 2am or 3am in the morning, and we don't realize that it is morning. But basically, life has been really good. And I'm grateful to the Almighty that I have a partner who is able to understand and we are able to research together in this exciting field.

13:49 Subhra Priyadarshini: Such beautiful synergy! Happiness in scientific pursuits demanding precision, patience and effort – giving shape to their research, beating all odds. This series was special, also because we not just got a peek into the cutting edge research of these scientists but also got to hear the humans behind them, the emotions that drive them.

14:14 Collage of voices of various scienctists

15:53 Aroma Warsi: And that explains basically why we are going to miss producing this series so much. But, of course, all good things must come to an end.

16:03 Subhra Priyadarshini: And, of course, an exciting new season awaits us – and I can only tell you that it’s going to be on an equally exciting new topic. So stay tuned! This is Subhra Priydarshini.

16:15 Aroma Warsi: And this is Aroma Warsi, wrapping up the “I am a scientist and this is where I work” series.

16:23 Subhra Priyadarshini: And though you know exactly where to find us – just letting you know once more – we are on Acast, Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, and you could even subscribe to our RSS feed. Till the next season, keep listening to us at Nature India podcast.

16:59 Sponsor announcement: This episode was produced with support from DBT Wellcome Trust India Alliance.