Kaapi with Kuriosity


Kaapi with Kuriosity is a monthly public lecture series organised by the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS-TIFR), in collaboration with the Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium and other educational institutions in Bengaluru.

The aim of the talks in this series is to stimulate the curiosity of the public towards the myriad aspects of science. The setting for these talks will be informal with a lot of scope for open discussions. The scientific background assumed will not be beyond the school level. As such, they are easily accessible to school/college students, families and working professionals interested in science.

Contact: outreach @ icts . res . in

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Past Talks
Paleovirology: the modern legacy of ancient viruses
Harmit Malik (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, USA)
4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Sunday, 10 December 2017
J. N.Planetarium, Sri T. Chowdaiah Road, High Grounds, Bangalore
"Paleovirology” is the study of ancient extinct viruses (called “paleoviruses”) and the effects that these agents have had on the evolution of their hosts. I will focus on studies that have employed computational and genetic techniques to identify such ancient viruses, or their evolutionary...more
Shapes and geometry of surfaces
Mahan Mj (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai)
4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Sunday, 26 November 2017
J. N. Planetarium, Sri T. Chowdaiah Road, High Grounds, Bangalore
Almost all shapes that we see around in space are examples of surfaces. We shall describe a method dating back to the 19th century of understanding these. Time-permitting, we shall describe more sophisticated geometric structures on surfaces. Event page Contact Us : outreach @ icts . res . inmore
Great Triumphs and False Stories: A Brief History of Histories of Indic and European Science through the Ages
Roddam Narasimha (Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore)
4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Sunday, 08 October 2017
J. N.Planetarium, Sri T. Chowdaiah Road, High Grounds, Bangalore
Among the many vociferous and emotional debates that India is currently going through on various deeply-civilizational questions (nation, religion, freedom etc.), there is also a rather specialized one on the value (or otherwise) of ancient to pre-colonial Indic science and technology as well. This...more
How connected are you? An introduction to graph theory and network science
Hugo Touchette (National Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stellenbosch)
4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Sunday, 17 September 2017
Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium, Bengaluru
Networks and graphs are all around us, even if we don't notice much: the roads, the electricity grid, the airline routes, the taxis in Bengaluru, even your group of real and Facebook friends - they're all networks involving, if you bring it down to the basics, some nodes and links between these...more
Fluids everywhere: flows on all scales
Julia Mary Yeomans (St Hilda's College, University of Oxford, UK)
4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Sunday, 06 August 2017
Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium, Bengaluru
Liquids and gases are moving all around us; the wind, rain, drops of dew on a spider’s web. But what happens on microscopic lengths – how do bacteria swim? Or at large scales in planetary atmospheres – fasten your seat belts, here comes turbulence. We will take a tour through the world of fluids...more
The Arrow of Time in Quantum Measurement
Kater Murch (Washington University, St. Louis)
4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Sunday, 23 July 2017
Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium, Bengaluru
What can quantum measurement tell us about the arrow of time? To answer this question, we use cutting edge techniques involving superconducting circuits cooled to near absolute zero to capture “movies” of quantum behaviour. When we press rewind on an ordinary movie of everyday life, the movie looks...more
ASTROSAT: A multiwavelength view of the Universe
S. Seetha (Programme Director at Space Science Program Office, ISRO (HQ))
4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Sunday, 11 June 2017
Christ University , Main Auditorium, Hosur Road, Bengaluru, Karnataka, 560029
AstroSat is the first dedicated astronomy mission of ISRO. Launched on 28 September, 2015, it has onboard experiments to view the sky in optical, UV, and X-ray bands. The sources in the dark sky appear very different in different bands and in order to comprehend the processes in and around these...more
The Visions of Shamans and Saints: Dynamic instabilities in Neuroscience
Bard Ermentrout (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Sunday, 14 May 2017
Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium, Bengaluru
Patterns are ubiquitous in the nervous system. These range from the temporal patterns of locomotion (e.g. gaits such as the trot, walk, and gallop) and other motor activity (head bobbing, scratching, tail wagging) to spatio-temporal patterns of neural activity seen during imaging of human brains...more
Random Walks in Science
Mustansir Barma (TIFR Centre for Interdisciplinary Sciences, Hyderabad)
4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Sunday, 09 April 2017
St. Joseph’s College, 36, Lal Bagh Main Road, Langford Gardens, Bengaluru 27
The element of chance enters in a crucial way not only in our daily affairs, but also in practically every branch of science. In describing the outcomes of chance, a central role is played by the Random Walker, a spirited individual who takes successive steps in random directions. The resulting...more
Work, Progress and Prosperity in the Time of Exponential Technologies
Vijay Chandru (Centre for Biosystems Science and Engineering (BSSE), Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru)
4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Sunday, 19 March 2017
Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium, Bengaluru
We are in an exceptional era in which we have the confluence of at least three technologies (mechanical automation, computing & communications and molecular biology) that have reached steep exponential scale. We call them second half technologies invoking the metaphor of exponential growth...more

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