Guys, appreciate the fact that this video was made by a computer guy who did not know anything of biology. It is also the skill of the bio people that they could get such an amazing video generated through the computer guy. Imagine the amount of discussions that must have gone into building this!!

UPDATE: Since the Youtube video is not working, here's another embed. Thanks to Anne Blythe for this link

I hope to put up the principle of that sometime soon

How To Turn Milk Into Instant Sugar! - Watch more amazing videos here

In awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the committee has signalled its view that climate change is now one of global society's defining security issues.

Just look down the list of previous winners and the issues they represented.

Nuclear weapons, nuclear proliferation, the Middle East, North Korea, East Timor, Northern Ireland, Soviet break-up, the ending of South African apartheid, landmines, the Middle East again, South Asian rural poverty... all things which threatened to affect, and in many cases did affect, the well-being of citizens inside and outside the conflict zones.

Now the Nobel Foundation has added climate change to the list. And the conflation of the laureates is interesting.

If the IPCC has been the global leader, Mr Gore has been its minstrel, taking the message of climate change to the public in a way that no-one had previously attempted.

Fast Math Trick - Click here for more home videos

We love to listen to our Ipods and mp3 players....aah! how i love the metal and the bass blowing into my ears! the superior transmission quality of the current models of earbuds an earphones enhances the effect of the noise to the limit of bliss!!

but i "hear" there is a small problem in this case. the human population is slowly gong deaf...yah u "heard" me right....according to a recent survey in the United States, 28 million people in the US suffer from hearing problems with 80% of them irreversibly affected.

According to the audiology researchers, the human ear can tolerate upto 80 decibels of sound for a long time without any issues. the problem is with higher intensity sounds. mp3 players produce around 120db sound which can wreak havoc in our ear.

our ear basically consists of a fluid in the cochlea, which absorbs the sound waves thus reducing their intensity a little bit. these sound waves pass through the fluid and generate motion in the ciliary hair in the ear, which gives rise to the "sensation" of sound.

High intensity sound waves rupture the cornea and also rip out the ciliary hair. most of these damage is irreparable. we dont realise the damage since it is painless and gradual, but it occurs...by god, it does!!

the good part is that the society is now slowly discovering the harmful effects of blasting sound INTO the ears. bad part is we youngsters are not bothered by it. music is our best companion in trains, at work, walking down the street or while lying down in bed. so whats the solution??

one way around the problem is to listen to sounds below 80 db. now how do we do that with an mp3 player? rule-of-the-thumb says "you are in the safe limits if your player is at less than 60% of its maximum volume" you can listen to this intensity even for long durations.

researchers are also of the opinion that out-of-the-ear headphones are slightly better than in-ear ones. there r some companies that also sell earphones that completely filter out external sound, so the need of pumping up the volume does not arise. plus, some medications are in the offing that kinda act like a buffer against high sound. (I wonder how?)

So the bottomline is...use your mp3 player responsibly. we hardly look at mp3 players and music as addictions on par with cigarettes and tobacco, but my friend, their effects r analogous....

may ur hearing be as healthy as ever!!!


For more details:
Click Here OR
Click Here OR
Click Here - Dangerous Decibels

Dear Readers,
This article has been written by a fellow contributor, Govindraj, who was, for "technical reasons" unable to post it himself on the blog.


These days, we hear a lot about indoor air pollution and its effect on human health. But what exactly is indoor air pollution? What are the sources of indoor air pollution? Why does it occur in the first place? Well, this article will try to provide some insights on that.

To start with, let me get to pollution in general. Contrary to popular belief, a pollutant is defined as a substance present in excess of its normal concentration in the environment. That means, any substance on this earth has a the potential to be a pollutant, if it is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Air pollution is a serious issue because unlike water and land pollution, physical boundaries are not sufficient to contain it. Pollution, in that sense, is a unifying factor across national and international boundaries! Consider the case in point: rapid industrialization in Germany and France led to Sweden's lakes turning acidic due to acid rain! Now, that is what they mean when they say that the world is getting closer.

Another myth is that CO2 is a pollutant. CO2 is a green house gas and is not a pollutant. CO2 will be called a pollutant if it is present in amounts exceeding 5000ppm and since there are a lot many sinks to this particular gas, there is scant possibility of this gas making it to that high a concentration. Anyway, coming back to the point at hand, we all know what ambient air pollution is. There are standards set by the Central Pollution Control Board [CPCB] which are known as National Ambient Air Quality Standards [NAAQS]. More information can be sought at the website: www.cpcb.nic.in

However, there are no standards prescribed for the indoor environment. Why is this so?

Consider the fact that there are at least a million registered and un-registered architects all over the world and each one has her / his own way of designing buildings. Each one gives different weightage to lighting and ventilation factors. Ergo, it becomes difficult to gauge how much air is going into an indoor environment and how much is leaking to the atmosphere from it. Also, the definition of the indoor environment is such that it becomes difficult to make a standard. An indoor environment is any place / location where one is not exposed to the ambient air directly. That means every place, right from schools to cars to trains and aeroplanes fall in this category. That makes a difficult job, that of specifying standards, impossible.

What then, are the sources of indoor air pollution? There are many, and a partial list can be found here: [The website of the United States Environmental Protection Agency] You will find among the many listed sources a source called Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS). Note the use of the word Environmental. Cigarette smoke has not been referred to directly, because cigarette smoke itself is a part of ETS. ETS is constiituted by cigarette smoke as well as the smoke that the smoker exhales. Overall, ETS is more harmful than cigarette smoke by itself is.

The cigarette burns at a very high temperature when the smoker inhales and the tip of the cigarette can be at as high a temperature as 900 C. Which probably explains why cigarette burns take so long to heal! Nicotine, the habit forming chemical present in tobacco, does not lead to the production of harmful gases / particulate matter. It is the "tar" present in the tobacco which leads to production of carbon monoxide and carcinogens and poly aromatic hydrocarbos like phenanthrene, flouranthene, etc. Carbon monoxide reduces the oxygen carrying capacity of human blood because it forms an irreversible bond with haemoglobin. Particulate matter settles in the lungs, and cigarette smoke has such small particles that they can deposit in the alveoli, which are the places where gas transfer takes place in the lungs i.e. oxygen is swapped for CO2.

The smoke that a smoker exhales has more of these smaller particles than he / she has himself / herself inhaled, because they are too small to get deposited in the smoker's lungs. However, in the time that elapses between a smoker exhaling and a passive smoker inhaling, these condense on other particles and grow sufficiently in size to get deposited in the passive smoker's lungs. Which is what makes passive smoking such a threat to humans! There are of course many other sources of indoor air pollution and I haven't even scratched the surface of this topic. However, I do believe that I will have generated sufficient interest in this topic by this small article for all of you to do some reading on your own. Based on the popularity of this post, I will decide whether to part with some more interesting information! Till then, adieu! :)


Govindraj

Enterprises are slowly awakening to the cause of the planet...not because they are becoming climate conscious, but because these"bloody environmentalists" are bloody "eating into their

First it was Apple that declared that it would go green, after a rather vociferous campaign by GreenPeace and Climate Counts invoking Apple to show some energy sense. Apple's environmental rating as established by Climate Counts is pathetically low.Not that any other companies fare any better.The lowest ones are Amazon, eBay, Wendy's, Burger King while those that are better off and among the top are Unilever, Canon, Nike. The non-profit org, and me too, urge people to buy their stuff from those showing some environmental concern.

GreenPeace also publishes its rankings every year...and I learn, Nokia is better off in its list of Green Electronics, than Apple. And IBM is also one cool dude...Some of the ratings are as follows:
Apple - 2 /100 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
IBM - 70
Toshiba - 66
HP - 59
Dell - 41
Canon - 77 !!!
Yahoo - 36
Microsoft - 31
Google - 17 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Google made an ambitious announcement to become Carbon Neutral b the end of 2007)
Coca Cola - 57
Pepsi - 26
Kellogg - 24

The latest entrant in the climate revival group is McDonald's, whose UK concern has committed to making all its vehicles run on organic gas - biofuel containing a mixture of cooking oil it uses everyday and petrol. The move, the company claims, would save 1650 tonnes of carbon every year...cool!

Why single out these cos when there are greenhouse emitters all around? True, there are emitters all around, but who says the cos are being singled out? Greenpeace and other environmental organisations are acting on multiple fronts - nations, companies, communities and individuals. Energy efficiency should be our prime concern too...So keep replace those incandescent tubes with CFLs, switch off unnecessary power, purchase stuff with an energy rating, and exhort others to do their bit for the planet...

That should keep the earth from warming even more because of you!! Remember the adage... "Think globally...ACT locally"

The female cheetahs that prowl the Serengeti in Tanzania appear to live up to their name, scientists have shown.

DNA analysis of the spotted cats found that they were serial cheaters, with nearly half of their litters made up of cubs from different fathers.

Writing in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the scientists say the infidelity may expose them to disease. However, it could also ensure the genetic diversity of the endangered species, the researchers hypothesise.

"If the cubs are genetically more variable it may allow them to adapt and evolve to different circumstances," Dada Gottelli of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and one of the scientists on the study told the BBC News website. "If there is a big change in the environment some may be able to cope better."

Excerpted from BBC Science News

For the complete article: Click Here

Earlier there was the Tree of Life project. The project aimed to plot out the phylogeny of all the organisms studied thus far. It intended to map out the diversity, the evolutionary history and the characteristics of different life forms. The project was a collaborative effort of some 550 scientists from all around the world, somewhat like Wikipedia, though not as free as that.

It was undoubtedly the first project of its kind. However, there were many problems facing it, one of them being funding and the other, absence of a good coordination and inadequate information usually incorporated due to contributor zeal rather than an organized effort.

To overcome these, and to make full use of the latest developments in search technology, another project called the Encyclopedia of Life is being envisaged. The project aims to be a one-stop shop for information about all the known 1.8 million organisms on this planet! One will be able to find not only the phenotypes, phylogeny of the organisms, but links to all the published papers, proteomic and genomic data, medicinal applications, amateur videos, conservation status ..everything...about the organism!! (Click on the pic alongside for demonstration pages of EOL)

If the new encyclopedia progresses as planned, it should fill about 300 million pages, which, if lined up end-to-end, would be more than 52,000 miles long, able to stretch twice around the world at the equator.Two foundations have given $12.5 million to pay for the first 2 1/2 years of the massive effort, but it will be free and accessible to everyone.

The IPCC Climate Report has really ushered in a flurry of activity, the epicentres of which seem to be at two points - UK and Bangkok.

The Blair Government seems to be really serious about doing its bit for the climate. And someone has to light the torch soon, or it would be too late. Amidst reports that the Arctic ice is melting at a rate faster than what was predicted, we have a cheerful news of Prince Charles addressing a press conference of some 1000 industry delegates and issuing a MAYDAY call with regards to climate. He pointed out the seriousness of the situation and asked the industry to take pro-active, concrete measures to reduce carbon emissions. He also suggested that the British Government provide additional incentives (apart from those offered by Kyoto Protocol) to encourage businesses to take affirmative action on climate change.

At Bangkok, meanwhile, the last leg of the IPCC research is on boards. 400 scientists from 120 countries will meet and discuss over a week, the future course of action regarding climate change. This final and third IPCC report, to be released on the 4th of May, will detail the ways to tackle climate change while taking into account the effects on the economy.

And that is when the real battle for Earth would start...

This is probably one image that has brought smiles all over the planet. Professor Stephen Hawking experiencing zero-gravity on a special Boeing flight, with an expression of exhilaration on his face. For the uninitiated, the famed physicist is preparing for his upcoming trip into space. Surely, a life worth lived...

Just before boarding the Boeing, he said the following:

"I believe that life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers. I believe the human race has no future if it doesn't go into space."


I will let the images do the rest of the talking...

Here's an interesting news. Researchers at some university in UK have shown that being fat or slim, diabetic or non-diabetic in adulthood can be modulated by adjusting your diet in infancy or probably while you are still in womb.

The researchers showed that pregnant rats fed with leptin-enriched foods (LEF) produced kids whowere lean in their adulthood. Also, infant rats fed with LEF showed a pre-disposition to being slim and trim. Thats cute, no?

The news is all the more relevant for me today because I have been forced to go to the gym now-a-days by my terrorist family members. "You have grown a double-chin, you glutton! And look at your tyres!!", roared my mom before picking me up by my collar and throwing me on a tread-mill 3km aay from my house.

The fact that I have grown fat, I can say now with confidence, was my mom's mistake and is my gluttony, over-eating and couch-potatoing is not responsible for it. She did not bring me up properly. She should have fed me with such leptin-rich foods in my infancy. I should probably go and tell her this...hope she allows me to rest peacefully at home...

And now China has also woken up to climate change. A report by the Chinese Government titles - National Climate Change Report - goes on to assess the impact of climate change on chinese resources. The report projects more droughts, the spread of deserts and reducing water supplies.

Some excerpts from the BBC article (link below):

"By 2020, the average temperature in China will increase by between 1.1C and 2.1C, causing worsening droughts in northern China and extreme weather," the Chinese report states. Its projections suggest that production of rice, corn and wheat could fall by 10% by 2030, and by up to 37% during the second half of the century.
But the report, compiled by more than 10 government bodies including the ministries of foreign affairs and science and technology, stops short of recommending cuts in China's greenhouse gas output. The report says China should not risk slowing its economic growth by curbing greenhouse gas production.


China is not just producing reports, its also taking some measures (and seeing to it that they get widely publicised!). Through UNDP, China and Norway (the world leader in climate activism and measures) entered an MoU on developing technologies for a sustainable environment. Both the countries would now work on redistribution and more efficient utilization of water and harnessing alternate energy resources.

There was another report somewhere of GM Motors launching cars having fuel cell and hydrogen powered propulsion systems at the Shanghai Car Expo. Although the venture is commercially unviable because of the high costs of lithium powered batteries, GM envisages an increased use of such technologies in the coming years. GM also carried out a feasibility study of the Chinese urban market and hopes to launch such cars in China soon.

Again...what are we Indians doing? I cannot expect the animal obsessed Maneka Gandhi to do something about climate change, but can we expect one more modern Sunderlal Bahuguna? A political initiative is needed here. We have a Ministry for Environment and Forest at whose helm is an insignificant DMK MP called A.Raja (who?) and someone called Namonarain Meena (INC) as a Minister for State. These, I guess, would be people who are happy and satisfied because they have got cars with red beacons and a "Minister" tag worth all its glamor and power. Who the hell would want to care about climate then?

The only thing this Ministry is involved in doing is making assessment reports on how buildings should be constructed, redevelopment plans should be passed or dams and power stations be built. Why do you need guidelines for that when you can bloody grease the palms of the ministers and the bureaucrats and get your work done?

As reports go, the British Foreign secretary proposed a debate on the topic of Climate Change in the UNSC, which the BBC report says, was countered by China, Russia and Pakistan (these three countries are mentioned in the report) on the grounds that UNSC was not the right forum to discuss such things.

I am not going into the debate of whether or not their point was justified. My question is why was India's voice so insignificant? After all, India is going to be one of the worst affected countries.

Our Himalayan glaciers melting are gonna render the Gangetic plain dry, the coasts will witness severe and more unpredictable torrents, the central lands will experience heavier droughts, Mumbai and Kolkatta will be partially submerged, a lot of flora and fauna are gonna get extinct due to the redistribution of climate zones...

Then why is our government so lethargic? Why do our politicians lack foresight? When the whole world is debating about CO2 storage and putting up space reflectors for bouncing off solar radiation, we squabble over petty issues like OBC reservations and whether Sachin should remain in the cricky team or not.

Such a waste of precious time and resources. We should be investing into sustainable energy sources. Brazil has been using ethanol-based fuels since the 1970's. Norway is surging ahead in using wind and solar power. The British government is talking about giving Energy Monitors to all homes to reduce greenhouse emissions and conserve energy. The US is funding large number of projects that aim to negate the effects of global warming...

Where are we in the picture?

BBC NEWS | UK | First climate debate divides UN

Human ingenuity never fails to stun me. Here's an extract of a news article that appeared on the website Fool.com. Its about this NGO from South Africa who is using Merry-go rounds to pump water from the earth. Its a one-shot solution for both....Billions of people facing an acute shortage of water and their children, who get a fantastic place to play!!

Here's the extract:
"
...
...
PlayPumps is based in South Africa, and like so many great things, it got its start from the mind of an entrepreneur. Trevor Field, an advertising executive, saw an opportunity when he came across a machine an engineer had developed that used a child's merry-go-round to pump water. Mr. Field saw a way to turn such a contraption into a more complex watering system. He also realized that the mechanism could solve one of the real problems that has bedeviled governments and other organizations for years: developing a water pump that circumvented the various unreliable sources of power to operate it.

But Mr. Field also noted that in the poorest areas in South Africa, children had precious few alternatives to play. So why not combine the two into a water-pumping system driven by playing children? He deployed the first two pumps in South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal Province in 1994, and they're still working today. The cost to provide water to a person using the PlayPumps system breaks down to about $0.60 per year.

...

...

Who would have thought that the man who started his filmography with the movie - Hercules in New York - would go to become the second-time Mayor of California and a climate spokesperson !! California today has the toughest laws in the world when it comes to pollution.

Making climate hip was his advice to students. Well, it is hip today to some extent. Greenpeace activists are hip. An association with Richard Gere is hip. But still the climate is not changing for the good...

Making Climate Hip is not as easy as making going to gym hip. There is trillions of dollars of investments on stake in the former...do u think Shell and ExxonValdezMobil, with lakhs of people on their payroll, billions of dollars of profits and revenues and undisputedly strong political clout would agree to the demands of the climatists of they were "hip"? I dont think so...

One quote from Arnold's speech is worth mentioning....

"Successful movements aren't built on guilt, they are built on passion"

Well, thats Arny for you...he didnt bcome the Mayor of California for nothing!

BBC News: Schwarzenegger: Make climate hip

iTWire - Star Trek-like ‘Tricorder’ becomes science fact:

About the size of a large car battery, the unit is, at less than 20 pounds, much smaller than the refrigerator sized, 300 pound units used in labs today, and comes with enough battery power to be used in the field.

Purdue’s researchers say that, far from being science fiction, the system could have ‘down-to-earth’ applications, such as such as testing foods for dangerous bacterial contaminants including salmonella, which Purdue says was recently found in a popular brand of peanut butter.

What the new unit does is miniaturize a mass spectrometer combined with a technique called desorption electrospray ionization, or DESI, and was invented by a team of researchers led by R. Graham Cooks, the Henry Bohn Hass Distinguished Professor of Analytical Chemistry in Purdue's College of Science.

According to Cooks, "Conventional mass spectrometers analyze samples that are specially prepared and placed in a vacuum chamber. The key DESI innovation is performing the ionization step in the air or directly on surfaces outside of the mass spectrometer's vacuum chamber. We like to compare it to the tricorder because it is truly a handheld instrument that yields information about the precise chemical composition of samples in a matter of minutes without harming the samples.”

The research team has used the device to analyze clothes, foods and tablets, and to identify cocaine on $50 bills in less than 1 second, with the technology now set to be commercialized by Prosolia Inc. in Indianapolis, and Griffin Analytic Technologies LLC, in West Lafayette, Ind.

Asteroid heading for Earth needs UN plan say scientists

While thousands of potentially dangerous Near Earth Objects (NEOs) have been identified by astronomers, the asteroid Apophis has been singled out for attention because it is going to have two very close encounters with the Earth within a short space of time. The first on Friday April 13 2029 will see the asteroid pass within an uncomfortable 30,000 kilometers. However, it is the second pass seven years later that have scientists worried. They're not sure whether the first pass will see Earth's gravity drag Apophis into a direct impact trajectory in 2036.

Enjoy!!







Bless you Jorge Cham for PhD Comics!!

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Through the climate window

"...

The higher degree of certainty that changes are down to human activities - up from at least 66% in 2001 to at least 90% now - is significant, as is the judgement that human activities are responsible for about 13 times as much of the warming we see as changes in the Sun's output.

As to what all that should mean, Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep), was in little doubt.

"Friday, 2 February 2007 may go down in history as the day when the question mark was removed from the question of whether climate change has anything to do with human activities."

The IPCC Report

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said temperatures were probably going to increase by 1.8-4C (3.2-7.2F) by the end of the century.

It also projected that sea levels were most likely to rise by 28-43cm, and global warming was likely to influence the intensity of tropical storms.

At variance

But a study published on the eve of the IPCC report suggested that the international body's previous reports may have actually been too conservative.

Writing in the journal Science, an international group of scientists concluded that temperatures and sea levels had been rising at or above the maximum rates proposed in the last report, which was published in 2001.

The paper compared the 2001 projections on temperature and sea level change report with what has actually happened.

The models had forecasted a temperature rise between about 0.15C-0.35C (0.27-0.63F) over this period. The actual rise of 0.33C (0.59F) was very close to the top of the IPCC's range.

A more dramatic picture emerged from the sea level comparison. The actual average level, measured by tide gauges and satellites, had risen faster than the intergovernmental panel of scientists predicted it would.

Global climate efforts 'woeful'

Rich countries have focused on ways to reduce carbon emissions but have largely ignored helping poor nations cope with the consequences, it says.

The findings appear in the UNDP's Human Development Report 2006.

The authors say farmers whose crops are reliant on rainfall are already having to cope with unpredictable weather.

The report, called Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis, says climate change "now poses what may be an unparalleled threat to human development".

The age-old dictat about cold weather-that cold weather causes common cold-is certainly a dampner for me, coz I like to drive my bike in the cold winter mornings, with the frosty wind blowing onto my face. But is this just another of those "myths" perpetrated by our ancestors (with "our" I mean mankind's...coz all round the world sneezing children cant venture out into the cold due to overzealous mothers!) ?
With a lot of spare time in my hands, I decided to dig more into this issue...

First thing, yes, there is a Yokozuna-like strong correlation, as you can see in the graph alongside. But does a strong correlation imply cause? That is what the debate is all over in the scientific community.

For long, the scientific opinion has been that cold weather does not cause common cold. there have been controlled experiments performed to that effect, which have repeatedly proved the absence of any cause-effect relationship. Someone has also done experiments in Antarctica and the Arctic, and they found that isolated people in these cold regions do not catch cold!

The rationale put forth for the correlation is that in winter people tend to remain indoors and huddle together, which automatically increases the interpersonal contact, thus leading to a higher chance of the coronaviruses and the rotaviruses spreading. Even the CDC and the NIH are of this opinion and state that the other opinion is just a myth. So that is the official, government stand...Read this 1928 report in American Journal of Public Health, titled The Weather and Common Cold

But still, there are skeptics (like me). I mean, there is such a strong correlation that the prevalent scientific logic seems a convoluted, contrived one. Again, in today's society, what is the difference between crowding in summer and in winter? We remain indoors for most of the time, and still cold continues to raise its ugly head everytime you breathe cold air for a long time, or keep your head wet and so on. So could there be any relationship at all?

Some studies do speak from the other angle. There is one from Cardiff, where 90 volunteers were asked to keep their feet in cold water for a week for 20 mins every day while 90 were control subjects. The investigators observed (symptomatically, though) that 13/90 of the test and 5/90 of the control suffered from common cold (I dont have the p-values)...which means more than twice the control group had cold.

Another study does some unique experiments in horses!!!! The researchers were trying to find out the reason behind exercise-related asthma. They found that inhalation of cold weather causes IL-4 increase in the nasal passage. IL-4 is a cytokine that triggers allergic reactions.

Other logic suggests that the nasal mucosa gets dry due to cold weather (Yah! I know that! My nose-digging frequency shoots up in the cold season!), which may allow an easy access to the virus. Or that the cold conditions activate the latent virus and causes relapse of the infection. (Although there isnt much evidence on the last point).

According to me, there is some logic in this line of thinking, that cold would act as an irritant and facilitate a viral infection. Because the "indoor-crowding" theory is just too absurd.

On the other hand, there is one good outcome of my research. I learnt that Chicken Soup (also some For The Soul, by the bedside) is very good for common cold, and it is not just a hocus-pocus advice. A study published in Lancet goes by the title - Hot chicken soup for asthma while another one in Chest talks of Effects of drinking hot water, cold water, and chicken soup on nasal mucus velocity and nasal airflow resistance. One more study also shows that Chicken soup inhibits neutrophil chemotaxis in vitro Note that the last research has been criticized in the later comments.

My belief in the effect of cold still remains "not phenomenally dented". Not that I dont believe the research, but the explanation for the observation is not good enough...

This recently in:

Lab documents development of Cancer Stem Cells

Xi He, M.D., Research Specialist II, and Linheng Li, Ph.D., Associate Investigator, are the first and last authors, respectively, on a new publication that clarifies how normal stem cells become cancer stem cells and how cancer stem cells can cause the formation of tumors.

For the original article, Click Here

I am having a lot of fun while researching on science hoaxes, and I thought it would really get some mucus out of all those starting to rot in their PhDs and otherwise... ;)

This is an assortment of hoaxes gathered from numerous sources on the web (well, I am also giving links, otherwise you'll start thinking this post is also an hoax...but if you were a sucker, how would you know??)

The Piltdown Man:
Universally considered as a super hoax, probably because it has been quoted as so a million times till now, so the founder effect continues. Piltdown man, like today's Homo florensis, was a novel primate species then, that seemed to be the missing link between humans and chimpanzees. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of the Sherlock Holmes fame, supposedly was a co-perpetrator of this hoax. Later, it was realised that the bones in the fossil records was a clever arrangement of human and ape bones!!!! How innovative!! Here are two images of the Piltdown man, one of them is real...guess which one?
(Hint: No, you are wrong...the one on the right is real)

Jan Henrik Schön and his Superconductors:
With 12 papers between Science and Nature, this PhD from University of Konstanz in Germany and then a researcher at Bell Laboratories was considered a genious. His world came collapsing in 2002 when it was proved that he had falsified data and had shot off the hip. He admitted to some 16 points of falsification and fabrication.
This is not new to science though. A survey conducted by the journal Science in 1991 of some 1500 scientists brought into limelight this issue, when over a quarter of them confessed that hey had faked data some point of time or the other. The next story is another glaring example of the same...

Hwang Woo Suk: The greatest fraud in living history?
Thats how Nature put it, probably because his paper on cloning was published in Science. A ground-breaking work - Hwang Woo Suk, supposedly a workaholic who worked for 18 hours a day in his lab, put together marvellous data that showed successful derivation of a healthy human embryonic stem cell line from an adult cell, which was considered an ardous task, and the technology believed to be years away. Hwang's work gathered praise and commendation from all corners, South Korea also had a stamp printed in his honour, until a Nature reporter and some of Hwang's own collaborators questioned the validity of his cell lines. An ensuing scientific investigation shattered his world.
A timeline of the fraud can be found on Nature's website. Click Here for the same.

Some other frauds of recent times, and some age-old ones, can be found in this Guardian article.

I came across two very interesting webpages, one of them again related to faked data. Just that these people from MIT are boasting about their Random Paper Generator. Here's an example of a randomly generated paper of which I am a co-author: (THIS IS A COMPLETELY NON-SENSE PAPER...A RANDOMLY "GENERATED" ONE)

On the Construction of the Producer-Consumer Problem

Gullu, Gaurav Moghe, Nelson Mandela and Pamela

Anderson

Abstract

The promoters of solar energy cleverly lead you to believe that it is perfectly safe. Yet they conveniently neglect to mention that solar energy is generated by nuclear fusion within the sun. This process operates on the very same basic laws of nuclear physics used in nuclear power plants and atomic bombs!

And w

hat is the source of this energy? It is hydrogen, a highly explosive gas (remember the Hindenberg?) Hydrogen is also the active material in H-bombs, that are not only tremendously destructive, but produce dangerous fallout. The glib advocates of solar energy don't even mention these disturbing facts about the true sources of solar energy. What else are they trying to hide from us?

In addition to the known dangers cited above, what about the unknown dangers, that very well might be worse? When pressed, scientists will admit that they do not fully understand the workings of the sun, or even of the atom. They will even grudgingly admit that our kn

owledge of the basic laws of physics is not yet perfect or complete. Yet these same reckless scientists would have us use this solar technology even before we fully understand how it works.

Facts about the toxicity and health hazards of Dihydrogen Monoxide

Yes, you should be concerned about DHMO! Although the U.S. Government and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) do not classify Dihydrogen Monoxide as a toxic or carci

nogenic substance (as it does with better known chemicals such as hydrochloric acid and benzene), DHMO is a constituent of many known toxic substances, diseases and disease-causing agents, environmental hazards and can even be lethal to humans in quantities as small as a thimbleful.

Research conducted by award-winning U.S. scientist Nathan Zohner concluded that roughly 86 percent of the population supports a ban on dihydrogen monoxide. Although his results are preliminary, Zohner believes people need to pay closer attention to the information presented to them regarding Dihydrogen Monoxide. He adds that if more people knew the truth about DHMO then studies like the one he conducted would not be necessary.

Global Warming. This is a HUGE HUGE HUGE topic. so I think I'll restrict myself to something specific...how about the effect of global warming on human fertility? These people found a strong inverse correlation between birth rate and increasing temperature. Wonder why the population of India is still increasing so fast, while Netherlands and Japan are in the negative...??

If you click on the above link, you'll get the PDF of the paper, published in an Elsevier journal called Medical Hypotheses (which has an impact factor of 0.920, for the uninitiated, thats at the bottom rung). See the paper's References and you'll realise that the quality of human semen has deteriorated over the past 50 years due to pollution...SHAME!!! SHAME!!!!

Cancer stem cells are today's discovery. But first, it was just Stem Cells, on which there was a huge debate. Stem cells are cells that have the power of regeneration and are responsible for creating a man out of a sperm and an egg, and subsequently maintaining him. No one doubted the presence of these cells, but the fact that embryos were being tampered with created a huge furore. This was, and continues to be, a controversy galore. And after the US, its now UK's turn to become The Righteous and put some ethics in the minds of "those barbarian scientists". EU has not been so high-handed, and it "may" be a good thing...
To know more about what stem cells are and the controversy involved, Click Here

The topic of the post, breathe easy, is not stem cells but cancer stem cells. So we'll leave the huge debate aside and talk about that more.

Well, fortunately or unfortunately, there is no debate about this. Cancer stem cells have been proven to exist time and again, mostly in the recent past. Cancer, first of all, is not necessarily caused by a single gene, there are multiple issues that can lead to cancer generation. But the general reason for its cause is mutations. Mutations that led to cells behaving and dividing normally, to start replicating at a furious rate, in a haphazard fashion to become a benign lump or malignant in nature.

Earlier doctors used to employ chemotherapy to treat cases of benign tumors and some malignant tumors too. Chemotherapy employs use of radiation and drugs that can, with a certain degree of specificity, kill the abnormal cells in cancerous tissue and leave the normal cells unharmed. However, as we all know, chemotherapy has its nuisances too. Again, it is not a foolproof method of cancer treatment, for many cases of tumor relapse started surfacing soon.

This question - Why does a tumor relapse after treatment? - is one of the most pondered medical questions of recent times. The widespread belief was also the most obvious one. That Chemotherapy does not kill all the cells, some remain, which again give rise to tumors. And the cycle goes on continuing till the hassled patient decides to give up his battle for life.

There were many problems associated with the then existing theory of cancer - that it is the replication machinery gone wrong. For example, why was it required to transfer hundreds of tumor cells to normal animal to cause cancer in the latter? If all cells were sick, any one should give rise to cancer.
The second problem was of tumor heterogeneity. Many tumors show a heterogenous composition of cells. Now if a terminally differentiated cell had started multiplying awkwardly, why would it give rise to unrelated cells??
Such questions could not be satisfactorily answered by the existing logic.

Then in 1997 came a ray of hope, from the University of Toronto in the form of the concept of Cancer Stem Cells. Dr.John Dick had been working on this thoery for quite some time, and had in fact, published a paper to that effect in 1994 in Nature, but it was not adequately recognized then. Finally in 1997, Dr.Dick (I'm feeling kinda oglytopsy while writing this name) again published in Nature Medicine with a larger dataset, and this theory came to be formally recognized as the Cancer Stem Cell Theory.

Evidence has accumulated over the years for the presence of cancer stem cells. They have been shown to be present not just in leukemia, but also breast tumors, brain tumors, in lymphomas and in gliomas. It is not that this hypothesis has not gone through any scrutiny, and some people have even generated a mathematical model for the presence of such cells, which come to the same conclusion. Of course, a fine-sounding nd a well-set theory will receive a lot of support from favorable data until someone calls the bluff (Not that anything like that would happen to cancer stem cells, but after all, the theory of black holes also was a very strong one...Hawking made a case debunking his own interpretation of the nature of black holes, and fought to lose a bet! Click on the link above to know more).

So now basically people are trying to understand how to differentiate cancer stem cells from the normal cells and the other cancerous cells in the tumor. There are two hypotheses regarding the role of cancer stem cells, as shown alongside, and this being an infantile field, reports are coming in rapidly from all corners of the globe. For recent reviews and papers on the field, Click Here. If this theory, which has received strong support from many quarters, is correct, then it wont be long before we are able to cure cancers completely. (1) (2) (3)

Source of the pic: Nature, Vol414, 2001, pg 105

One strange thing about these cancer stem cells is the fact that they are able to differentiate into tissues. So they must be following defined pathways of tissue differentiation. People are now looking at these pathways. Also, if the hypothesis that "the stem cell population in a tumor remains constant" is correct, it means these cells, even in the mish-mash of their hypermutated genomes are able to divide and differentiate into one progenitor and one stem cell (as shown below):

Mother Cancer Stem Cell ----> Progenitor cell + Daughter Cancer Stem Cell

and this would be quite an interesting, and queer happening. I mean, letting go of the shyness in replicating (and thus replicating indefinitely) is one thing, having controlled mechanism of differentiation is a different ballgame altogether!!

So, all-in-all, cancer-stem-cell theory seems all set for further takeoff. There is very little chance that the field would fizz out too soon, so be on the lookout for new news!



PS: Michael Crichton's NEXT is a fascinating read, the concepts being stem cells, tissue and gene patenting, law suits, talking parrot and recombinant chimpanzees. The density of plots is high, and I bet, you will not be able to predict how everything's gonna end, till the last 10 pages...Click Here to go to Crichton's official website.

This post has nothing to do with Science directly, but it is surely educative. I am posting this to stress the role of Validation before coming to any hasty conclusions and impressions.

The following quote is attributed to Lord Macaulay, one of the first law-makers of modern India. Lord Macaulay was instrumental in setting up the English system of education in India, which as a consequence, led to the downfall of regional learning centres. Ancient wisdom slowly came to be regarded as Old-Worldly. And a hundred and fifty years after Macaulay, today, we look at anything falling under the bracket of "Indian Science" with thorough skepticism.

People of Independent India have argued since long that the lack of pride about India and the Indian Culture stems primarily from this British system of education, which in the words of Macaulay was intended to "form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, -a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect."

To forward these interests, the pioneering speech-called The Minute on Education- made by Lord Macaulay to Lord Bentnick is frequently referenced. In the mails circulating on the Internet, and quite a few websites, the following quote is attributed to Macaulay:

“I have travelled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.”

as being given on the 2nd of February, 1835 to the British Parliament.

The quote appeared to me as doubtful, given the strong objectivity in the statements which is quite infrequent in parliamentary speeches, especially those that go to form a Policy. So I decided to verify the same from authentic sources.

From what I learnt after a short investigation was that this speech was never delivered to the British Parliament in 1835. Unauthentic sources claim that from 10th June, 1834 to early 1838, Macaulay was in India, and so could have never delivered this speech to the British Parliament. (Remember, marine travel was the only way to travel then). Apart from that, the actual Minute on Education has not said this at all, even to that effect. Agreed, Macaulay says things like:

"We are a Board for wasting the public money, for printing books which are of less value than the paper on which they are printed was while it was blank-for giving artificial encouragement to absurd history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics, absurd theology-for raising up a breed of scholars who find their scholarship an incumbrance and blemish, who live on the public while they are receiving their education, and whose education is so utterly useless to them that, when they have received it, they must either starve or live on the public all the rest of their lives. Entertaining these opinions, I am naturally desirous to decline all share in the responsibility of a body which, unless it alters its whole mode of proceedings, I must consider, not merely as useless, but as positively noxious."

and

"The languages of western Europe civilised Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar."

or

"Assuredly it is the duty of the British Government in India to be not only tolerant but neutral on all religious questions. But to encourage the study of a literature, admitted to be of small intrinsic value, only because that literature inculcated the most serious errors on the most important subjects, is a course hardly reconcilable with reason, with morality, or even with that very neutrality which ought, as we all agree, to be sacredly preserved. It is confined that a language is barren of useful knowledge. We are to teach it because it is fruitful of monstrous superstitions. We are to teach false history, false astronomy, false medicine, because we find them in company with a false religion. We abstain, and I trust shall always abstain, from giving any public encouragement to those who are engaged in the work of converting the natives to Christianity. And while we act thus, can we reasonably or decently bribe men, out of the revenues of the State, to waste their youth in learning how they are to purify themselves after touching an ass or what texts of the Vedas they are to repeat to expiate the crime of killing a goat?"

and so on.

The point is, the quote that is widely regarded to be by Macaulay was NEVER HIS!. It is a reading between lines, and that too done wrongly. I do not intend to say that Macaulay's Policy did no harm to the structure of Indian Science or Indian Culture, but I feel, Macaulay had no intention of "breaking the backbone of India" while formulating this policy. Even the statements above need to be read in their proper context.

It comes out from the analysis that Macaulay was probably distressed by the hoardes of superstitions, or the practice of rote learning prevailing in India then. There was no new literature being created, no new science in the bloom and everything was as stagnant as it could get. Macaulay attributed this to the Vedas and the Ancient Culture itself, rather than to the contemporary society and recent histories of foreign invasions. What he had set out to eliminate was not the ethos of the Indian Society, but the rot within. He was not framing a policy to enable British to rule India, but to make the Indian Society intrinsically better. His intentions were clear, his methods controversial.

The thing to learn is to not accept any statement, any opinion at its face value. A proper judgement is required to differentiate between fact and opinion, which keeps on getting better with experience. I wonder how our Honorable President, Mr. Abdul Kalam, succumbed to this hoax! You can find the reference to the hoax-quote in a speech delivered by him at Jamia Milia Islamia in 2003. Click Here to go to the page and then find "Macaulay" there.

Yoohoo! Titan has liquid lakes! Confirmed! And that means a lot for Earthlings! It means that we may not be alone in this solar system, let alone the Universe! There might be life...yes, LIFE!!...somewhere else too!!!

Whoa! Hold On! What is Titan, you may ask, if you are not an avid astronomy fella. So, lets start with the basics.

Titan is one of the 34 moons of Saturn, and the largest. It can even be seen through a normal refractor telescope. We wanted to go to Saturn, because it was one of the planets that had never been "formally" paid a visit. We (and we here means Us, Earthlings) have sent Galileo to Jupiter, the Pathfinder to Mars, the Venus Express to Venus, the Messenger to Mercury and the Ulysses to the Sun. Venus, Mars and Jupiter have been visited umpteen times till now, because of their importance in propelling spacecrafts via a technique called "Gravity Assist". Mars has also had the fortune of being in the centrestage of today's exploration, with several missions currently in place.
We also have a New Horizons mission to explore the dwarf-planet Pluto propelling through space as we speak, its near Jupiter as of today.

-->The adjoining photograph is of the frozen seas of Europa, the satellite of Jupiter taken by Galileo before it crash-landed on the moon. Europa may house life beneath this sea.


OK, so Saturn. Our phenomenal Vikings and Pioneers had flown past this planet some 30 years ago, and we were desperate to set our foot on that planet. So this Cassini-Huygens Mission.
Cassini reached Saturn in 2004 and started beaming back soon, giving the first close-up glimses of the ring systems of Saturn. And then there was Huygens.

We wanted to go to Titan. It was one of the few places in our solar system where we expected to find signs of life, because of its largely methane-filled atmosphere. In the desperation to know whether we are alone in this Universe or not (just imagine that...imagine the scale of the Universe, and we being alone...chilling...) we sent the $3.2bn Cassini to deliver the Huygens package to Titan.

The first images of Titan, taken from the orbit, swept everyone off their feet. The infrared images indicated possible presence of lakes on Titan! Now, we never expected to find water filled bodies, as the temperature on the surface is -180C. At this temperature, methane, a gas on Earth becomes a free-flowing liquid. Titan had methane lakes. It had streams flowing to fill in the lakes. It had methane evaporation-rainfall cycles. In some aspects, it was similar to what Earth was 4 billion years ago! Maybe there is life down there?

In the recent issue of Nature, the images, obtained during the Cassini Radar flyby of Titan on 22nd July, 2006, have finally been concluded to be showing methane lakes. The radar images also showed presence of a mountain range, quite nicely seen in the animation at the bottom of this page.
The Huygens landed on Saturn in 2004 and sent the first images of the New World. The mission directors were worried it would land in one of the methane lakes and get drowned, but before that it would send enough data for them to analyse for an year. Thankfully, it landed on some place that seemed to be a shore-line. This was one of the first images transmitted of the New World back to Earth.

That Titan has a methane environment means a lot to us. At the right temperatures, maybe near some volcanic sites, one may find evidences of another life. Would it be carbon-based? Would it contain DNA? How would it be shaped?

We have some more candidates for presence of life. One is Mars. With the recent discovery of water at the polar caps, we expect some life-forms to be dwelling there, of course microbial. An interesting fact revealed recently : We may have actually "bumped off" microbial life while looking for them in the Martian soil during the Viking mission. It is now hypothesized that Martian life may be partly water, partly hydrogen peroxide based.

Another is Europa. Since the moon was romanticized in the Arthur C Clarke Novel - 2010 Odyssey Two - it has long been a source of wonder. We expect to find life somewhere below its icy seas, near hydrothermal vents that may exist deep down. Maybe another mission after Galileo to explore that? It had been sanctioned, but set aside for now. People, either fascinated by the mysticism of Europa as also the knowledge-driven one, are both vociferously campaigning for a Europa lander mission like the Mars Pathfinder. But Cassini-Huygens are surely taken the shine off Europa, and we might see more lander missions to Titan now.

The third candidate is another Saturn moon-Enceladus. Some regard it as the best bet for life, because it has frozen water, like Europa and frequent volcanic activity (as shown alongside) of not magma, but water. Yes, Enceladus has volcanoes of water. Around these "hot regions" people expect to find life.


So the question still remains-anyone else apart from us? The Drake's Equation says, Yes, there is a good probability. We might take some years to verify that, and experts from SETI are quite confident that the picture will be a lot more clearer by 2025.

That is if no one nukes America by then. Such a paradox, our spacecrafts are landing on new worlds, exploring the heavens, finding newer niches and paving the way for mankind to step on these worlds soon enough. And back home, we still fight like dogs. Maybe each one of us is more concerned about keeping his/her own life than finding new life somewhere else??