Millennia-old micro zombies

by Hansraj Agrawal | Oct 20, 2025 | Science

What lies beneath… permafrost
| Photo Credit:
Adrian Wojcik

What is ‘death’? Is it just the freezing of ‘life’ chemicals into seemingly eternal immobility, but which can be warmed back to life? What is ‘life’ indeed? Is it something that can be shelved — and de-shelved? These questions — and more — swirl around in the liminal space between science and philosophy.

We are used to believing that death is a permanent state, but that comes into question when you learn that some scientists, acting on a crazy idea, brought back to life microbes that were trapped in deep ice for 40,000 years.

Inconceivable as his idea may have seemed initially — waking microbes that had been “dead” for forty millennia — Tristan Caro, a postdoctoral research associate in geobiology at Caltech, did succeed in convincing his colleagues to embark on this ‘mission impossible’.

They dug deep into permafrost for the microbes and placed them in heavy water (containing a heavier isotope of hydrogen). Six months on, their patience… and faith… paid off — the microbes came alive and built a flourishing colony.

“These are not dead samples by any means,” says Caro, in a statement issued by the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he earlier graduated in geological sciences. “They’re still very much capable of hosting robust life that can break down organic matter and release it as carbon dioxide.”

Caro has just scratched the surface — literally. “There’s so much permafrost in the world — in Alaska, Siberia and in other northern cold regions,” he says. “We’ve only sampled one tiny slice of that.” There is also a hidden warning to the world. These zombies, woken up by a warming world, might wreak havoc on the environment, accentuating climate change.

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Published on October 20, 2025

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How robotic cancer surgery aids recovery

by Hansraj Agrawal | Oct 20, 2025 | Science

Advanced robotic surgery allows for faster recovery for patients in cancer treatment, even as it helps cut overall healthcare costs.

Conventional surgery often results in substantial physical trauma, while robotic methods help minimise this trauma. “This helps reduce the body’s stress response and quickens recovery,” says Dr Venkat P, a member of the Veritas Cancer Care team who is also associated with Apollo Cancer Centre.

For example, conventional open surgery for colorectal cancers typically requires hospital stay of 7-9 days, followed by about a month of recovery at home. Robotic surgery reduces this to just two days in hospital and about one week at home, according to the Veritas Cancer Care team, led by Dr Venkat and Dr Priya Kapoor.

Here’s how it works: robotic surgery requires the surgeon to manoeuvre the instruments from a console that is at a distance from the patient.

Dr Venkat says the team pioneered the robotic nipple-sparing mastectomy in the country in November 2023. It has 58 cases under its belt, he says, among the highest across the country. This is an important option for young patients anxious to retain an aesthetic appearance after surgery. Using robotics to remove muscle and skin from the patient’s back for breast reconstruction results in smaller scars, reduced tissue trauma and faster recovery.

The team also performed the first robotic cytoreductive surgery for complex ovarian cancers. Combined with hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy or HIPEC, the procedure helps significantly improve outcomes. HIPEC is a surgical procedure in which heated chemotherapy drugs are directly circulated into the abdominal cavity after cancer tumours have been surgically removed.

This treatment is used for advanced abdominal cancers like those in the appendix, colon, stomach, and ovaries, as the heat increases the drugs’ ability to penetrate cancer cells while reducing side effects.

The team also conducted Tamil Nadu’s first robotic surgery for thyroid cancers. Dr Venkat explains that there is no scar in the neck, and only a small keyhole scar in the underarm for improved cosmetic appeal.

The Veritas team has also conducted complex ‘Whipple surgeries’ using robotic methods. The Whipple technique is a complex surgery for pancreatic cancer involving the removal and reconnection of the pancreas, stomach, and bile duct. Dr Kapoor says, “We have performed at least 28 Whipple surgeries.”

But doesn’t robotics involve high investment, thereby raising the overall costs for the patient? Dr Kapoor agrees but points out that “shorter hospital stays and lower risk of complications, such as wound infections, help lower the need for expensive post-operative care and medicines. For patients who are working, returning to their workplaces earlier adds to the long-term benefit. Likewise, for those who travel to a different city for the surgery, shorter hospital stays brings down associated expenses.

But not all cancers can be removed using robotic methods. ‘Surgical selection’ remains paramount, she emphasises. Keyhole surgery cannot help in the case of complex, large tumours (for instance, an ovarian mass measuring 30 cm). As the tumour must be removed whole in such cases, too, a large incision may be needed, whether or not robotic methods are used.

Robotic ‘telesurgery’?

Telesurgery, or remote robotic surgery — where the surgeon operates from a distance — is possible and has been demonstrated through trans-Atlantic cardiac surgeries several years ago. However, says Dr Kapoor, it’s not a regular feature in complex cancer surgeries as it would need two equally skilled surgical teams at both ends, as well as extensive engineering support. This is critical in case the telecom signal is lost mid-surgery or if there is some malfunction in the robotic platform.

She also points to ethical issues surrounding such an operation where the surgeon is not present in the same location as the patient. She says the most practical and ethical application of telesurgery is in the training and mentoring of other robotic surgeons — where the mentee surgeon performs a surgery, while the mentor monitors and guides from another location.

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Published on October 20, 2025

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Robots with dexterity

by Hansraj Agrawal | Oct 20, 2025 | Science

IIT-Madras team works on ways to strengthen the grasp of robotic hands

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Traffic forecasts suited to Indian roads and vehicle types

by Hansraj Agrawal | Oct 20, 2025 | Science

Traffic predictions can help public transport authorities in scheduling or rerouting buses
| Photo Credit:
Travel Wild

Ask Associate Professor Bhargava Rama Chilukuri why he chose to do research on traffic speeds, and he will tell you: “Drawing an average from a given data set does not actually represent any part of that dataset. Traditionally, traffic velocity has been estimated for one class of vehicles, say, cars. Those findings have then been extrapolated to other vehicles — such as trucks (half as fast as cars), bikes (1.25 times faster), etc. That doesn’t lend a lot of accuracy.”

He and his colleague Abirami Krishna Ashok, at the Civil Engineering Department of IIT-Madras, have come up with a framework for characterising and predicting traffic states under different traffic conditions. “This is important for a country like India as we have different vehicle types depending on the purchasing capacity of individuals. In the US, far more families own cars than in India, so a homogenous model is fine,” Chilukuri says.

Converting all vehicles into ‘passenger car equivalency’ units, resulting in a single-state variable, worked well in the Western economies that came up with these models. Metrics that work for the US do not adequately represent class-wise behaviours in India.

Chilukuri says, “Our framework identifies unique speed patterns for each class of vehicle — whether it’s a two-wheeler or a heavy truck — making it possible to deliver much more accurate class-wise traffic forecasts and smarter, data-driven interventions to alleviate congestion and enhance safety.”

The findings of the research were published in a paper last year in the IEEE Access journal.

The exercise collected travel time data, often sourced from sensors. This raw data is ‘class-agnostic’, meaning the travel-time records do not identify the vehicle class — whether car, truck or bike. The data is aggregated into five-minute periods and cover a range of speeds from 5 kmph to 65 kmph.

Traffic states

In a video interview with businessline, the researchers said they used learning algorithms to cluster the data to identify the most frequently occurring traffic states. The study defined 50 traffic states.

To order these states from ‘freely flowing’ to ‘congested’, the researchers used the concept of ‘area occupancy’ (AO) — these are values calculated for each defined state, considering five predominant vehicle classes: two-wheeler (2W), three-wheeler (3W), car (CAR), light commercial vehicle (LCV), and heavy vehicle (HV).

States are then ordered in the ascending order, with State 1 denoting free-flow (lowest AO) and State 50 denoting highly congested (highest AO). This process allows for the estimation of class-wise speeds. The framework defines speeds based on the speed dynamism exhibited by vehicle classes, generally following the order of 2W, 3W, CAR, LCV, and HV.

The researchers’ model aims to predict traffic states using state information from prior records and pattern probabilities, which are fed by daily observations, such as peak or off-peak hour traffic.

The traffic state predictions are subsequently mapped back to vehicle class-wise speeds. The researchers say this approach showed advantages against existing methods in performance and efficiency.

Chilukuri says the prediction results showed that the proposed approach preserves the order, or ranking, of class-wise speeds better than the traditional approach. For the test dataset, the joint model retained the correct rank for all five vehicle classes in 58 per cent of observations, compared to 46 per cent in the traditional model.

Ashok points out that the predictions can help public transport authorities in scheduling or rerouting buses. Likewise, logistics firms can help their fleet perform more efficiently. The model, the researchers say, can serve as the foundation for systems suited to future traffic conditions, which will likely see a mix of human-driven, autonomous and electric vehicles.

The next step, says Chilukuri, is for the institute to engage with the technology industry, ideally digital mapmakers, to use the proposed model for more accurate estimations of traffic speed, flow and density.

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Published on October 20, 2025

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Cheaper, smaller EV charger

by Hansraj Agrawal | Oct 20, 2025 | Science

With the rising use of electric vehicles (EVs), the paucity of fast-charging options is a major challenge — high-speed chargers need over 1 megawatt of power, enough to run 1,000 homes. Existing charging stations use line-frequency transformers made of copper and iron, making them bulky, costly and inefficient due to multiple power conversion stages.

To overcome this hurdle, researchers at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, in collaboration with Delta Electronics India, have developed a cascaded H-bridge (CHB) multi-port DC converter that connects directly to the medium-voltage AC grid. This eliminates the need for large transformers, cutting cost, size and material use.

The converter can simplify EV charging infrastructure and boost efficiency by 3–5 per cent, a major gain at megawatt scale.

“Our invention streamlines the process between the grid, storage and vehicle battery, offering significant energy savings and a smaller environmental footprint,” says Kaushik Basu, Associate Professor at IISc, in a write-up in in-house publication Kernel.

The bidirectional converter can power multiple vehicles, store energy locally in batteries and even feed power to the grid during outages. This ensures reliable supply, especially for critical facilities like hospitals.

A 1.2 kW lab prototype achieved over 95 per cent efficiency, and the team is scaling it up further.

The technology also has potential use in data centres, wind farms and rail systems, enabling high-efficiency conversion at medium voltages.

IISc and Delta are setting up a 2,500 sq ft lab to demonstrate a megawatt-scale converter capable of charging a 200 kW bus and a 50 kW car directly from an 11 kV grid.

Light, flexible solar cell

Researchers from Aalto University and University of Cambridge have discovered that carbon-based organic radicals — molecules with an unpaired electron — can act as efficient semiconductors, paving the way for a new class of lightweight, flexible solar cells.

Unlike conventional organic solar cells, which need two carefully matched materials to generate and move charges, these radicals can function as single-material semiconductors. Their lone electron makes them excellent charge carriers. When exposed to light, a thin film of these radicals can generate and separate electrical charges with 100 per cent efficiency, converting all absorbed light into usable energy, says a press release from the university.

Traditional silicon solar panels are heavy, rigid and opaque, limiting their use in devices such as smart windows or wearables. In contrast, radical-based solar films could be thin, flexible, coloured and lightweight — just a few hundred grams for an entire panel. They can be bent or shaped easily, and their manufacturing process is simple and scalable.

“Our work shows that radical-based semiconductors can generate electricity without energy losses,” says Petri Murto, Academy Research Fellow at Aalto University. The discovery builds on earlier research, where radicals developed for LED materials showed unexpected charge transfer behaviour — electrons could move freely between molecules instead of staying bound.