Chai and Why,’ a popular outreach programme conducted by a group of faculty members of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, hosted its 250th event on November 18. The programme, which has been going strong since 2009, comprises talks and demonstrations by scientists for research scholars on a science topic, pitched at an easy to grasp level. These talks take place on alternate Sundays at Mumbai’s Prithvi Theatre, among other places.

A similar annual event, ‘Science at the Sabha’, is conducted by scientists from the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai. For three years since 2016, SATS, which includes four talks from four different disciplines in science, has been held at the Music Academy, Chennai, known as the premier city platform hosting musical and dance programmes. As a bonus, at last year’s event, the organisers distributed dodecahedral calendars for free.

The National Centre of Biological Sciences has in its cocktail of outreach activities a programme called ‘Out of the Lab,’ in which scientists from the institute can be invited to homes, where they address fascinating aspects of their respective fields to neighbours who have gathered together. There is little doubt that outreach programmes have come far from the days when they were thought of as additions to academic work. Science in its very practice tends to lead researchers into ivory towers. The more demanding the task, the less time the scientist has to communicate the relevance of her work. The first casualty of this traditional workflow is that knowledge of what goes on within the lab is understood by few outside. The other is that labs within research institutes get separated from the universities, colleges, and schools where future scientists are groomed. Add to this existing social gaps due to language, class or caste, and you have an apparently insurmountable situation.

Outreach programmes do a lot to break the notion that research can be understood only by people within the lab. They do, however, suffer from a couple of drawbacks such as scalability and reaching beyond urban borders. The Indian National Science Academy encourages its Fellows to travel to remote locations and give talks.

Answer the following questions from the above passage-

Questions-

1. A popular event chai and why at which institute was held and when?

2. Who is involved in this program and what kind of performance?

3. On which subject and where has SATS been conducted for 3 years from 2016?

4. How many incidents does this traditional workflow have?

5. What are the cases within and outside the laboratory from the outreach program?