March 2009 - Posts - Lab Rats

March 2009 - Posts

Shut up and Vote & fire your mirror neurons

Posted by Seema Singh at 
I've shut up, even though I have a long list of complaints. And I am going to vote, after a long time. After several hours of mindless queuing up for getting a series of errors corrected, I finally have a voter ID that has my name and address correct. I'd have easily given up but for a set of photos that I saw my photographer colleague meticulously...

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Do you have money illusion?

Posted by Seema Singh at 
In these uncertain times when wealth seems to have been eroded from the markets, (and investment banks), if people have illusions about money, it shouldn't sound unusual. After all, even behavioural economists have proposed something called ‘money illusion', though it is nothing but a deviation from the rational evaluation of money. And rationality...

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strange happenings in BlackBerry country

Posted by Jacob Koshy at 
The University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada is a great campus to stroll in. Pretty and pleasantly wintery, what struck me though was the spate of BlackBerrys around. Everybody, from the university managing director to the students are twiddling on these phones and in my relatively-brief 6-hour time on campus, i didn't see anybody use a non-BlackBerry...

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The rise of the blogs...

Posted by Seema Singh at 
...And the fall of science journalism. Nature Publishing Group, one of the largest in scientific publication, has undertaken a survey of science writers to find out how they are faring in the time of unprecedented pressure from the Internet and the current economic slowdown. The survey of about 500 science journalists worldwide shows that as jobs are...

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Religious belief + cancer = Prolonged life?

Posted by Seema Singh at 
Several scientific studies have studied the effect of religiosity on cancer survival, sometimes even on the risk of getting certain cancers. A new study in today's JAMA ( Journal of the American Medical Association ) shows that cancer patients, with strong religious belief, and hence positive religious coping, are about three times as likely to...

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Do Indian scientists also need money?

Posted by Seema Singh at 
It's a silly question. Who doesn't need money? But if you read this letter from an IIT-Delhi electrical engineering professor, you'll realize that our government departments and universities think our scholars, scientists and academicians don't need money. When it comes to availing their sundry services - thesis/document reviews, expert...

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It may be possible to 'read' your memories

Posted by Seema Singh at 
Our most guarded personal bastion - our thoughts and memories -- may now be vulnerable to advances in neuroscience and imaging. According to a new research published in today's Current Biology , it will one day be possible to ‘read' a person's memories just by looking at brain activity. Overturning the current scientific thinking, researchers...

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Communicating sci/tech/engineering. Whazzat?

Posted by Seema Singh at 
Recently, director of a CSIR lab (in Gujarat) asked me: "If I want to hire someone like you, what should I look for - one who has studied science and can write well, or one who writes well but can understand science?" Somewhat flattering as it was, (C'mon, we don't get to deal with savvy PR persons; ours is direct ‘marketing')...

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Obesity, sex life, infertility & diabetes

Posted by Seema Singh at 
Too many correlations here, but they all point to one thing: the war on obesity needs more ammunition. In a new study to be published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, researchers say hormonal changes and diminished sexual quality of life in obese men are related to the degree of obesity. "In our study population, we found...

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In search of innovators

Posted by Seema Singh at 
Last week New Delhi sanctioned a budget of Rs700 for the extension of New Millennium Indian Technology Leadership Initiative (NMITLI) program, which was first started in 2000-01 to bring about disruptive innovation, not incremental, in Indian science and technology. Under the extension program, among other things, newer mechanisms will be operational...

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