Jacob Koshy and Sobhana K Nair guide you on a scenic route through the history of science. Filled with fascinating anecdotes, deep archival dives, and a closer look at the quirky minds behind groundbreaking ideas.
Latest episodes
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35 min
The Shy Nobel Laureate: Har Gobind Khorana and 'Total Synthesis'
What happens when a bureaucratic blunder wrecks a young scientist's career plans, and the wreckage turns out to be the making of him? And why would a man who helped crack the langu…
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54 min
Where Have The Birds Gone? with Asad Rahmani
Common birds are no longer common. Rural landscapes now host fewer Black Drongos and Indian Rollers; Nightjars call less frequently from the edges of forests; Black-shouldered Kite…
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23 min
Part 2 | The Bomb, the Faith, and the Country That Disowned Abdus Salam
Can a man work at the very frontier of physics and still hold a deep religious faith — and did Abdus Salam ever feel the two were at war? Did the world's first Muslim science laure…
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38 min
Part 1 | Abdus Salam: Nobel Laureate, Physicist and Heretic
What does a borrowed cow have to do with a Nobel Prize? And how did a committed atheist set a devout Muslim on the path to becoming one of the great physicists of the twentieth cen…
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1 h 00
The Mathematics and Loneliness of DD Kosambi w/Prof. Ram Ramaswamy
Did Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi solve the Riemann Hypothesis - one of mathematics's greatest puzzles? Was Kosambi, who wrote one of the most influential books on studying Indian hi…
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15 min
Part 3: How El Nino Choked Civilisations and Stirred Revolution
Could a warm patch of water in the Pacific have influenced both the French Revolution and some of India's deadliest famines? In this concluding episode of the series, Jacob and Sob…
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16 min
Part 2 : El Niño: From Titanic to Monsoons—The Climate Story That Changed Everything
What do the Titanic and a pair of ship's cooks have to do with one of Earth's greatest climate mysteries? In this episode, two remarkable stories become the gateway to understandin…
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21 min
Part 1: El Niño: How a Warm Patch of Pacific Water Came to Rule India’s Monsoon
How can a patch of warm water thousands of kilometres from India determine whether its farms flourish or fail? And how did a mathematician help uncover one of the greatest hidden c…
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31 min
India's Dinosaurs | Part 3: The day it all ended
What if we told you that one of the most extraordinary dinosaur fossils ever found was in India — a snake caught mid-strike, coiled around dinosaur eggs, frozen in time for 67 mill…
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31 min
India's Dinosaurs | Part 2: The Coal That Found a Lost Continent
What does coal have to do with a lost supercontinent? And how did one tiny Punjabi town give India both its dinosaur hunters and one of the greatest actors in its cinema? In 1840s…
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38 min
The Story of India's dinosaurs | Part 1
What did the world's greatest anatomist mistake a dinosaur bone for? And how did the man who hunted India's most feared serial killers end up discovering Asia's first dinosaur foss…
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31 min
Visvesvaraya, Cauvery and Karnataka’s Water Legacy
When people speak of Sir M. Visvesvaraya, they usually remember him as one of India’s greatest engineers. As Diwan of Mysore in the early twentieth century, he championed ambitious…
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48 min
Forgotten Heroes | Part 3: Yellapragada Subbarow - The forgotten alchemist
In the annals of modern medicine, few scientists have saved as many lives while remaining as profoundly overlooked as Yellapragada Subbarow. Born in colonial India and later workin…
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39 min
Forgotten Heroes | Part 2: How India gave the world the first blood pressure drug
What did Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill have in common, besides shaping mid‑20th mid‑20th‑century history? Both suffered from hypertension, a condition Western medicin…
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36 min
Forgotten Heroes | Part 1: How two Indian mathematicians were denied credit for inventing fingerprinting
Hem Chandra Bose and Aziz Ul-Haque were the experts who played a pivotal role in developing the Henry Classification System for cataloging finger prints. This was during the early…
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27 min
India's First Computers | Part 3: How software won
India’s computing story unfolds in two distinct phases. In the decades after Independence, the country set out to build its own computer hardware. But from the 1970s onwards, that…
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37 min
India’s First Computers | Part 2: TIFRAC & IBM’s Double Game
In the mid-1950s, while the world was still reeling from the dawn of the atomic age, a group of visionary scientists in a makeshift barracks in Mumbai were chasing a different kind…
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35 min
India’s First Computers | Part 1: A Historian’s Tragedy
In the first of a 3-part series, we discuss the origins of India’s quest, first to procure and then to build a homegrown computer in India. Coming very close to the Indian independ…
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41 min
PC Mahalanobis: India’s First Data Cruncher
Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972) was a Bengali statistician and institution-builder who became one of the most consequential figures in twentieth-century Indian science. Tr…
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37 min
India's First 'Lady Doctors'
This podcast explores the lives of India’s first female doctors, framing their struggle not as a technological quest, but as a profound social rebellion. Beyond merely practicing m…