Himalayan Institute for Contextual Sciences
- Registered Himalayan Institute for Contextual Sciences Pvt. Ltd. · Lalitpur · 2026
- IESH v0.1 prototype bench testing in Kathmandu — air, soil, gas, sky camera + learning portal
- Custom boards + enclosure hardening the prototype for field deployment
- Crystal Mountain School thermal array multipurpose hall under construction · sensors installed during the build · Dolpo 4,000 m
- Muon detector design and planning for the altitude-flux network
- Ahead school station network · planetarium · all-sky camera
Open data
No public data yet — the first instrument is still on the bench.
IESH v0.1 is in bench testing in Kathmandu — a modular environmental and learning node we're now hardening into custom boards and a field enclosure. The open-data pipeline — ingest API, public dashboard, CSV/JSON downloads — is built and waiting. The first field unit's readings will appear here automatically.
Station network
7 stations in network · Nepalgunj–Dolpo muon transect planned · open data from day one
The gap in the data
Nepal sits at the intersection of some of the most important scientific questions of our time — atmospheric pollution, seismic hazard, climate adaptation, cosmic ray physics. It is also one of the most under-instrumented countries on Earth.
HICS is building the measurement infrastructure to change this.
Instrumentation & measurement infrastructure
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MEMS Seismometer Network Low-cost, GPS-timed seismic stations for dense urban monitoring. Based on MEMS accelerometers with continuous data streaming.
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Portable Inflatable Planetarium Mobile astronomy for schools without dark skies. Inflatable dome with digital projection system. Original Nepali-language astronomical programmes.
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SDR Radio Science Station Software-defined radio station serving multiple science programmes simultaneously: meteor scatter detection, lightning sensing, ionospheric monitoring, and weather satellite reception.
All instrument designs published open-source. Any institution anywhere can build them.
Education & open knowledge
HICS's education programmes bring instruments, data, and scientific practice directly into schools and communities. Not textbook science — students analyse real data from real instruments collecting real signals.
Gender equity is structural, not symbolic: fellowship selection, camp admissions, teacher recruitment, and mentoring structures all explicitly work to reduce barriers for women and girls.
Latest notes
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IESH v0.1 — Field-Testing the Classroom LaboratoryFrom a Raspberry Pi and a breadboard on 20 May to a boxed, working station on 10 June. The modular v0.1 adds soil temperature and moisture, CO and air-quality proxies on a proper ADC, a fisheye sky camera, and an onboard learning portal with 25+ activities — all working with zero internet. Notes from the bench, with the full build-log gallery.
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Crystal Mountain School — Designing the Thermal ArrayWe are embedding a roughly 50-sensor temperature array into the walls and rooms of the new multipurpose hall at Crystal Mountain School while it is being built — the first systematic thermal-performance dataset for a passive solar building at 4,000 m in Nepal. These are the design notes; the data comes after commissioning, not before.