Akshat Jiwan Sharma

Lignocellulose has emerged as one of the most important material systems of recent times. It is a promising green platform that can be used in structural and functional applications. Wood has millennia of engineering history behind it—lignocellulose based materials are a natural evolution of wood engineered after extracting the raw material from wood/woody biomass itself.  Researchers have been able to tune the properties at the cellular level and learnt how to fibrillate wood into its constituents or apply steam and pressure to mold it like plastics. The paper and pulp industry has played a prominent role in helping us understand lignocellulose chemically and develop chemical tools to manipulate it.  Lignin, largely  a byproduct of paper and pulp , has been receiving a lot of attention by chemists not only because it constitutes 30% of mass of the plant materials but also because of its unique chemical properties —ring like structures and hydroxyl groups that can be func...

Being one of the fastest growing regions in the world, Asia Pacific’s stature in the scientific community is growing as is the region's ambition to play a greater role  in shaping research through science diplomacy. I have had the good fortune of connecting with delegates from Singapore and South Korea in conferences last year. Similarly I had the opportunity to engage virtually with researchers from Australia during Australian Academy of Science’s flagship event ‘ Science at the shine dome ’ in 2025.  A few days ago I attended the International Science Council’s ( Asia Pacific chapter) quarterly meeting. Three things that stood out during my interactions were : focus on workforce development, democratization of science for greater public participation and emphasis on sustainability.  All three issues are highly relevant but for Asia Pacific in particular workforce development takes special priority as STEM courses are often viewed as a path to a prosperous f...

This summer on star wars day I decided to give Knights of the old Republic (KOTOR) a try. I like star wars franchise but I'm not too deep into the lore ,so initially , I was a bit undecided about the game but took a chance since I had heard from so many people that it's one of the best RPGs ever made. After finishing the game I've got to say that it's reputation is definitely well deserved. The game leans heavily towards narration and your choices can have long lasting impact on how the story plays out. Combat is real time action but you don't control characters directly rather issue commands via a pause menu. It takes a while to get used to but works very well especially on mobile touch screens. I felt that some abilities are way overpowered. Especially the light side ones that buff your characters and grant them extra turns.Even a dark ability' like destroy droid can clear out some of the toughest opponents in a few turns. From what I understand this game is b...

Quite an interesting discussion on materials sub-reddit today regarding the thickness of insulation and whether it relies upon material properties. Can we make insulating materials thinner? Exactly what physics is in play here?   Making insulation thick is inexpensive and does not add much weight either. Most of it is just air. And since air has very low thermal conductivity (.026 W/mK) it makes for an effective insulation. Aerogels work on the same principle: it's just a material frame for trapping lots of air ,of course with nano-scale pores suppressing conduction even further due to the knudsen effect.  But they are more difficult to manufacture , as compared to say thermal blankets which can be prepared by simple weaving.  Regarding physical limits — yes there is one. If we look at Fourier's law of thermal conductivity, it scales inversely with length. So a thinner insulation transfers more power than a thicker one of the same material.  And actually this pr...

I finally got an opportunity to meet Prof Rajesh Prasad in person this summer at IIT Delhi ,8 years after I first watched his lectures on materials science. It was by chance I stumbled across his video on composites when I was researching substrates for antennas. Fiber reinforced plastic came up repeatedly so I thought it wouldn't hurt to learn a bit more on this subject.  That was my first encounter with materials science. At that time I wasn't looking to go too deep, just learn enough to understand the systems that I was planning to work with. The idea was to build base stations with in house assembly and some quick engineering to attach components and protect them in a casing so that they could last a while. How hard could it be? Right? Only during the lockdown did I have enough time to take his full course.  My interest was in part because of my own desire to learn about materials — for engineering projects I had in mind but also because I wanted to break out o...

Advanced manufacturing, especially of functional materials, requires careful mapping of properties to the underlying microstructure. In technologies such as microfluidics,composites and electronics the features are either too small or too complex to be imaged using optical microscopes. Alternative imaging techniques are necessary so that the relation between material structure and materials properties can be understood.  X rays are an indispensable tool to look at micro and nano structure of materials both functional like electronics and structural like composites. Historically Xrays, since their discovery in 1895, have provided many breakthroughs in imaging that have enabled scientists to advance both material and medical fields. Bone imaging is the most well known application of X rays but the application of X ray diffraction also led to the confirmation of atomic structure in materials and the invention of x ray crystallography. This new technique was later used to i...