10 PET bottles. That’s how many are required to create one of the new official jerseys that the Sri Lankan cricket team will wear during the much anticipated ICC World Cup that begins at the end of this month. Designed and created by MAS Holdings, the innovative fabric is called Ocean Plastic – a nod … Continue reading
The heavy, metal apparatus standing in R. Lorrence’s garage seems out of place. Its design is simple enough – a pneumatic pump helps pack a mix of explosive chemicals into a slender plastic tube, exerting pressure that a human hand couldn’t hope to match. But it is the only machine in this little cottage firework … Continue reading
The tragic suicide of a friend when he was 13 years old inspired Arun Ravi to develop Mevoked. He remembers his friend’s parents wishing they had only known of the despair their son was feeling. Decades in the making, Arun’s new app is an answer to them. When you install it – a basic version … Continue reading
[COLOMBO] Sri Lanka’s innovators need state recognition and funding to foster an innovation culture, a meeting has heard. “Our inventors need state recognition, society’s appreciation and funding to commercialise their ideas,” Tissa Vitharana, Sri Lanka’s senior minister for science, said at a ceremony to award the country’s innovators last month (17 Oct) in Colombo. Despite limited government support … Continue reading
At the Sri Lanka Institute of Nanotechnology (SLINTEC), today is someone’s birthday – the riot of pink and yellow post-it notes decorating Prof. K.M Nalin de Silva’s door single him out. For the Science Team Leader it’s a fine day to meditate on the world of his ancestors and to imagine the one his children will … Continue reading
In late 2011, a 28 year old Sohan Dharmaraja was just wrapping up his PhD thesis in Computational Mathematics at Stanford. With a Masters from MIT in the subject already under his belt, his current interest was in how excruciatingly accurate high fidelity real world simulations could be played out on computers – if you crashed a Prius into a … Continue reading
Thrice a year, Prof. Anil Gupta goes for a very long walk – his ‘Shodh Yatras’ can take 10 days each and he and those accompanying him (sometimes as many as 100 people) will cover about 250km. Their quest is startling – unfolding as it does far from the elite university campuses and the corporate … Continue reading
For a garment that could be charitably described as ‘skimpy’, a bra can be remarkably complex. Into the making of one particular bra went a range of elastics, lace and yarn; there were the cups and hooks, the embroidery and the underwire. In total, it added up to 21 components and 8 packing materials each … Continue reading
Dressed in his regulation sarong and t-shirt, Laki Senanayake looks like there are few things he takes seriously – certainly, he doesn’t count his reputation as an ‘artist’ among them. “I’m assured by various people…that I’m Sri Lanka’s leading artist – God knows where I’m leading anyone,” he says, grinning. We meet Laki at Barefoot, … Continue reading
The Mahabharata – sometimes considered the fifth Vedda – is longer than the Odyssey and the Iliad combined, and its influence rivals that of the Bible and the Quran. Though ranked high among the world’s most ambitious and absorbing works of literature, it hasn’t always been among the most accessible. Yet, Devdutt Pattanaik’s ‘Jaya: An … Continue reading
Smriti Daniel 