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??

One of the most awaited awards of the year.The IgNobels are awarded for "Research that first makes people Laugh, and then makes them Think". This year's award ceremony was held on the 5th of October at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.
This year's awards include some of the following:

1) ORNITHOLOGY: Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches.

2) PEACE: Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellant -- a device that makes annoying noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults; and for later using that same technology to make telephone ringtones that are audible to teenagers but not to their teachers.

3) MATHEMATICS: Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization, for calculating the number of photographs you must take to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed

4) PHYSICS: Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris, for their insights into why, when you bend dry spaghetti, it often breaks into more than two pieces.

5) This is my favorite:
BIOLOGY: Bart Knols for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet.



Click Here for the official site or here for a Wikipedia entry. Adjoining is seen the photo of the 2005 IgNobel awards, where the winners gather for a pointless photo opportunity.

• Interesting ideas related to life and evolution
• Interesting papers, especially on molecular evolution
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