January 2009 - Posts - Lab Rats

January 2009 - Posts

Do you Twitter?

Posted by Seema Singh at 
Earlier this week after meeting someone (from the industry), I asked for his email since he had run out his business card. The person said, "I am on FaceBook, you can get me there." I replied, "But I am not...or well, I am, but my registration is incomplete". (I keep getting mails to complete it, but I've incorrigibly failed...

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Honey, please count the kids!!

Posted by Jacob Koshy at 
The economy is down, but the babies are booming. Triplets, quadruplets...and now more octuplets ?. Maybe i'm watching too much of tv, but rarely a few months go by without reports of succesful septuplets and sextuplets? Studies in the United States have shown an increasing trend of multiple births (twins, triplets...) over the last two decades....

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US patents: still a pipedream for Indian pharma, biotech

Posted by Seema Singh at 
This news is rather deflating. Out of 424 homegrown Indian pharma and biotech companies (excluding Indian subsidiaries of MNCs), only 57 hold US patents, amounting to 19 in biotechnology and 425 in pharmaceuticals. These patents, granted till the end of 2007 both for processes and products, have been obtained since 1990 in the case of pharma, and 2001...

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Trust me, I'm from the media

Posted by Seema Singh at 
Okay, okay, this headline is to get eyeballs. But trust me, this headline is also what many journalists make the motto of their professional life (though I can't comment on how much they live up to it). And now, it seems, it even has a bearing on public health - trust in the mass media promotes health, says the first-ever study to analyze the relationship...

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Why you can't hurry courtship

Posted by Seema Singh at 
My fascination for math is growing. Among the zillion things that it can possibly do -- predict climate change or crop production, monsoon or drought; choose the right drug target or the wonder molecule; financial jugglery on Dalal Street or Wall Street, banking or insurance, et al -- it is now shedding light on romance. Number crunching, it appears...

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Sound Check: Another Big Bang?

Posted by Jacob Koshy at 
Would you have attended the recent 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, boring as it sounds. Like hell, i wish i had. Alan Kogut of Nasa's Goddard Space Flight centre, and his colleagues, reported "some new and interesting things were going on in the Universe." Apparently there's an inexplicable 'roar,' a booming...

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I, me, and my genome

Posted by Seema Singh at 
After the Nobel prizewinner James Watson and controversial geneticist-entrepreneur Craig Venter , it's the iconic cognitive scientist Steven Pinker , now at Harvard and earlier at MIT, who is getting his genome sequenced in full public glare. As one of the 10 volunteers of the Personal Genome Project , he is putting his genome data on the Internet...

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The universe is yours to explore, in the remaining 354 days

Posted by Seema Singh at 
Diehard stargazers or amateur astronomers, all will have ways and means this year to bring the Universe closer to the Earth. Literally. Marking the 400 th anniversary of Galileo's first astronomical observation through a telescope, 2009 is being celebrated as the International Year of Astronomy. India, along with 134 other nations is part of the...

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Indian science: memoirs & biographies, or lack of them?

Posted by Seema Singh at 
If there's one aspect of Indian science that has disappointed many science lovers, it is a lack of brilliant accounts by scientists themselves - books that can give the adrenaline thrill of research to the readers. Medicine Nobel prize winner Peter Medawar wrote in 1968: "The lives of academics, considered as Lives, almost always make dull...

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Technology's gee-whiz effect on education

Posted by Seema Singh at 
The Indian cabinet last week cleared the Rs 20,120 crore Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan , the gargantuan plan to universalize secondary education. Last week the government also said it will implement the National Mission on Education through ICT at a cost of about Rs 4,612 crore over the remaining years of the 11 th Plan. This is a suggestion from...

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The Great Barrier Reef is declining

Posted by Seema Singh at 
In yet another blow from the warming climate, the world's largest coral reef system, the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, is on a decline. One of the wonders of the natural world, which comprises more than 3000 reefs, has had the slowest rate of growth in the past 400 years, says a new study in today's issue of Science. Researchers from the...

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