A sob story

Seems like ‘Times- they are a changing’.

Contrary to popular beliefs, men do sometimes cry or tear up in public. Seems like teary eyed male politicians and media personalities are seen more now a days than before.

There is something about well built men who otherwise have competitive attitudes and are best in their fields going misty eyed. On one hand sensitivity is seen as a positive step towards compassion and honesty, although only in moderation.

I remember some reality shows on Bravo, one was the ‘Project Runway’ and the other was ‘Top Chef’, both were competitions and some men did weep incessantly due to the stress and tensions and were subsequently reprimanded for not being professional.

So too much crying or too often can also have the opposite effect. Although women have perfected the art of moderation equals to effectiveness, the men are new at this and so do not know when to stop.

However I have seen most of the men in my family or friend circle tear up and cry (I don’t have anything to do with it…really).

When it was time for my parents to bid me goodbye during my annual home visits, it would be my Dad who would start the weeping program and my Mom would just look on (almost glad that the visits were over and now she could have the TV remote all to herself and of course now she wouldn’t have to live in the kitchen).

I remember watching the movie Kuch Kuch Hota Hai with a male friend in a movie theater.

After half an hour i was distracted from the screen by someone sniffing and sniffling nearby. I turned to look at my otherwise well built male friend and there were tears rolling down his cheeks like Ganga Jamuna. Later on he disowned his teary episode to a cold (which he caught only for the duration of the movie…amazing movie virus AMV).

How does one distinguish between a mere demonstration and  a sincerity.  Well, its really not easy and other background factors like how much you know that person both publicly and personally do play a major part.

Crying is only an emotional display and so like love is universal.

Is the sceince REAL?

I remember watching Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos: A personal Voyage’ when I was young and being very inspired by it. The enormity of the galaxy outside our planet gave birth to a sense of awe and curiosity for the unknown.

In those days there were no popular science shows except Star trek (which is watchable even today).

But today in the 21st century, there are quite a few shows on TV based on Science or Scientific procedures. But are these for mere entertainment or the science depicted in them for real?

NBC shows like Law and Order and CBS shows like CSI (Crime scene Investigation) depict a team of forensic scientists investigating murders or crimes using biotech techniques like Mass Spectrometry, Gas Chromatography, PCR (Polymerase chain reaction) and DNA sequencing.

Whereas in the real world a graduate student takes 2-3 hours to setup, start a reaction and run an agarose gel to analyze the PCR products (amplified quantity of polymerized DNA), in the CSI show it takes only five to ten minutes. Same is with other procedures like gas chromatography. The most amazing instrument is the DNA sequencing machine. It takes only a matter of seconds for the DNA sample to be run and out comes a crisp colorful printout.

No it dosent happen that fast in the real world. But when a show has only an hour to solve a crime, I guess the protocols need to be as swift as possible.

However,the scientific thoughts and procedures in the shows are very rational. Combined with the fact that the scientists are extremely good looking, the shows do have very good viewer ratings.

One other show that is a funny sitcom is The Big Bang Theory. The show depicts a group of physicists and their interactions with each other and the non physicists around them. Although the physics part is doubtful(http://nymag.com/guides/fallpreview/2007/television/36554/),

to their credits, the writers and actors of the show make everything seem very real.

Although I wish the science behind these shows would be more practical and close to reality, the fact that these shows are gaining popularity with the masses, indicates a ’science friendliness’ that i cant help but feel glad about.

Bhool Bhulaiyaa

This weekend went by in a flurry and in between finding time to do laundry and grocery and visiting the Durga Pujo Sammelan at Queens, I squeezed in time to watch the latest Mumbai Flicker ‘Bhool Bhulaiyaa’.

I am one of those people who watch horrors and thrillers during evenings (not gory ones like Groundhog but milder ones like Geherai, Dark water and Poltergeist) and subsequently remain immobile with fright for the rest of the night.

Bhool Bhulaiyaa is a thriller and the plot builds up to a gripping climax and a very well acted last ten minutes.

The story begins with the home coming of an NRI couple to their ancestral Palace in India. The introduction of the movie begins with some strange happenings in the Palace due to a murder which had occurred in the past.

Against the wishes of other family members, the couple decide to stay in the Palace and slowly things start going wrong.

I felt the best part of the movie was that Psychiatric science was used to treat the perpetrator with the help of the village Tantrik.

Unlike other Mumbai horrors, the Tantrik here is a respected and educated person who gives lectures on Paranormal behaviors in reputed Universities. He helps the Psychiatrist to recreate a scene from the past so that the patient can overcome her disorder.

Vidya Balan is good and holds the finale efficiently. Akshay Kumar besides his good looks, acts well. The screenplay drags in the middle of the movie and there are certain oft repeated comedy scenes.

However the film engages the viewer and there is a rationale to every part.

The patient in this film suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder ) ; which is triggered due to stress or trauma.

The DID patients switch from one to two or more personalities and suffer from amnesia as a result of which they do not remember their actions.

A good watch.

SHUBHO BIJOYA AND A HAPPY DUSSHERA

Its Dusshera and a time to feast (feast your eyes in this case).

Hoping and wishing that all of you are having a great time.

When DNA meets Dementia

The 1962 medicine Nobel Prize winner, one of the scientist who solved the molecular structure of DNA,

the 79 years old Dr. Watson of the Watson and Crick and Wilkins fame seems to think that

he has no hopes for the inhabitants of the African continent simply because in reality, they are not as intelligent

as ‘ours‘.( http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2677098.ece?token=null&offset=0).

Well, i dont know what exactly he meant by ‘ours’, is it his continent (North America),

where scientific community is chiefly made up of a mixture of various races, or may be

him alone (in that case he has forgotten how diversified Cold Spring Harbor labs are).

Personally i do not believe that a scientist of his caliber should be so prejudiced about

‘not promoting individuals at a lower level‘.

Does a higher level not need a strong lower level? What has he done to empower the Africans with

good health care and schools?

Doesn’t he know that decades of poverty, illness and wars have stripped the African continent from

individuals who can just amuse themselves with basic science research?

I thought that most winners just stop working after being awarded a Nobel Prize.

I had no idea that their brains stop too.

Are you Virally challenged? No i just have the flu

Some years back when Bill Clinton was making headlines about ‘non governmental’ activities in his office,

I mentioned to a colleague, how i really admired Mr. Clinton as a President and how a momentary lapse in

judgment can erase the respect and honor of a life time.

“Well he is just Ethically Challenged” She replied.

I had heard that word for the first time and was taken aback at how being politically correct could be used to generalize a condition.

Is it right to group a man who had an extra marital affair with another who deliberately announced fraudulent financial reports of his company to gain stock exchange mileage?

So cant we just say such and such had an affair and such and such is a financial fraud?

I am visually challenged because i am impaired without my glasses and so is a person who cannot see at all, even with glasses (then there are those who fail to see even with a 20/20 vision). Yes we all fall in the same category.

Just because someone’s motor activities are limited, You can’t call them mentally challenged. They can still think you know.

How far will we drag ourselves into being politically correct?

I will have to stop now. All this is leaving me verbally challenged.

Mini Labs

Children should be encouraged to help out adults in the kitchen (under strict supervision of course), because kitchens are like mini labs.

They are the gadget corners of the house and if your child thinks that the only gadget at home is your x box, then you do need a kitchen makeover (not to mention jail time for feeding your child frozen, artificially preserved food all the time).

For an example, say you are going to use the mixer grinder for making a paste- there is lurking a perfect example of centrifugal force;the same principle that runs the centrifuges and vortexes in bio labs.

Pressure Cooker is a perfect mini autoclave and the high temperature of the steam under pressure, cooks and sterilizes food and saves time (yes and then you can go and twiddle your thumbs).

Microwave and convection ovens are master pieces of genius physicists. Percey Spencer discovered microwaves when his peanut chocolate bar was zapped by this frequency of waves (Wiklipedia). Convection ovens cook food by circulating hot air through the food.

The process of cooking itself is an experiment in Biochemistry. You have to add the exact amounts of ingredients, you may weigh them out or use your instincts (i am not talking of serendipity but experience), but nothing is more irritating than a ruined experiment because of excess addition or deletion of a component.

For more high tech gadgets used by today’s chefs, you can see this page.

Cooking with children will not only increase bonding, but help them later on when they live away from home.

These gastronomic exercises will also generate their curiosity and allow them to try out a variety of food groups.

Who knows but the gadget studies in kitchen could also build a future Nobel Prize winner.

A tune is stuck in my Head

Has this occurred with you when a song or an advertisement jingle gets stuck into your head and seems to be unavoidable?

Well i suffer from the disease of tune attachment (tunearia aka tuneitis or even tuneemonia) and sometimes it is so bad that i have side effects of insomnia and subsequently dark under eye circles compounded with it.

Yesterday when for the sixth day the latest Old Navy sweater jingle left me sleep deprived, I looked up what the cognitive scientists have to say about this common affliction (YooHoo, i am as insane as the next normal person).

It seems that the auditory cortex in the brain that is the site of processing sounds, can be recruited even in the absence of the sound. Although research in this area is still in its infancy, scientists have found that the visual cortex is as guilty as the auditory receptors. (http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0896627305005180)

What i really marveled at was the human form; not only can we enjoy music but also replay it in our heads when we need to or sometimes as in my case have no control over the replay (may be i am insane).

But is it necessary to see everything so scientifically and not just enjoy music because We Can? I think it is an occupational hazard for which i guess there is no actual cure.

I do not think this ailment is hereditary because my parents have genuine concerns that keep them awake at night (like how in the world did they end up with me, in spite of re checking the family trees over and over again).

The scientific knowledge has however, helped me. Since I started reading the research paper and writing this post, the old Navy jingle has subsided to a mere whimper.

I think Descartes was right in some ways, although in my case it is

‘ I know so I can sleep’

2007 Nobel Prize In Medicine

 Genetics has secured Nobel Prize before. Bacterial genetics, Plant genetics, frog genetics, nematode genetics and drosophila genetics have all been awarded Nobel prizes. This time mouse genetics has secured a prize.

What are the advantages of mouse as a model study system?

1. Mouse is a mammal and its physiological systems are similar to man. Also it can multiply every nine weeks and so progenies arising from a single animal can be quickly studied.

2. Mouse genome has been sequenced and there are less than 30,000 genes, 30% of which are identical and of the remaining, 80% are similar to man.  http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v420/n6915/abs/nature01262.html

3. Human diseases like cancer and diabetes effect mouse and can be studied at cellular levels.

4. Certain genetic disease like cystic fibrosis which occurs only in man can be studied by manipulating mouse genome.

The Nobel Prize for Medicine 2007 has been awarded to Mario Capecchi,

Sir Martin J. Evans and Oliver Smithies for gene targeting in mice using stem cells.

[A Stem cell is a progenitor cell that has the potential to either multiply into another stem cell or grow into any kind of specialized cell (like skin, liver, heart, brain etc)].

First alterations are made at the DNA level to knock out a particular gene and this DNA is injected into nucleus of mouse embryonic stem cell,

where through recombination, the altered DNA is incorporated into the homologous gene, thus knocking it out or rendering it inactive.

When the stem cell containing this knocked out gene multiplies, the cells are injected into a normal mouse blastocyst (an embryonal cell mass arising from and inside a fertilized egg). Pups born as a result of this will be mosaic containing both knocked out and normal genes.

However when such an adult mosaic mouse is bred with a normal mouse, it will give rise to knocked out and normal mouse strains.

The knocked out mouse can be used to study genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis and also form a foothold towards gene therapy.

More information will be found in http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2007/press.html

Also see http://laviequotidienne.wordpress.com/2007/10/09/the-genetic-research-gold-rush/

Animal research should however be done with caution. It is imperative that a researcher has to be compassionate and sensitive to an animal he/she studies.

In the USA, The Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) monitors all animal research. There are guidelines set by USDA and National Academy of Sciences for animals used in scientific research.

2007 Ig Nobel Awards

The 2007 Ig Nobel awards have been announced. The awards which are supposedly lighter versions of the more serious ‘Nobel Prize’ are awarded by committees consisting of an actual Nobel Prize winner (yes from the serious one) in a function conducted at Sander’s Theater at Harvard University (yes the Boston one).

The research topics of the winners are not only utterly amusing but also thought provoking (ahem..). Like this year’s prize in Aviation went for discovering how hamsters recover faster from jet lag when on Viagra (http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0703388104v1 and http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070521/full/news070521-1.html). Move over melatonin, the little blue pill is here.

Similarly, Side effects of swallowing swords was the winning entry in Medicine and you wont be surprised that mild side effects are sore throat and grave ones often result in perforation of pharynx (ouch). The article has been published in the respected Bristish Medical Journal or BMJ (http://www.bmj.com/cgi/reprint/333/7582/1285).

The Peace prize went for research and development of a “Gay Bomb,” which would cause enemy troops to become sexually attractive to each other (hmm. if only we could have such bombs to end all violence in the world).

The Linguistics prize proved that rats sometimes cannot distinguish between Japanese played backward and Dutch played backward (what??? They can distinguish these languages played forward? And sometimes played backward too? issh I feel so ignorant).

Similarly prizes are awarded in the fields of Biology (for taking a census of all the mites and other life forms that live in people’s beds),

Chemistry (extracting vanilla flavor from cow dung),

Economics (patenting a device for catching bank robbers by ensnaring them in a net),

Literature (study of the word ‘the’),

Nutrition (for investigating people’s appetites by secretly feeding them a self-refilling bowl of soup), and

Physics (for a theoretical study of how sheets become wrinkled).

Since the hypotheses were substantiated experimentally and published in good science journals, one cannot really deny them the seriousness they deserve. I am just amazed at the originality and magnificence of the human mind.