This years The-scientists 'Academia - Top 40 US institutions' is out and can be followed at:
http://www.the-scientist.com/fragments/bptw/2010/academia/bptw-academia-top30.jsp
and best placse to work in Academia - International Institutes can be followed at:
http://www.the-scientist.com/fragments/bptw/2010/academia/bptw-academia-top.jsp#small
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Sunday, May 17, 2009
The Watchmen!!
So, first of all I am not a sci-fi kinda person!! I mean I do not have that much inclinations for sci-fi movies!! I tried my levels best to watch one on the Television but alas...I just could not!! Imagine on a "TV" I couldn't!! And today I watched "Watchmen" in a movie hall....!! Gosh!! an experience to share indeed!! My true feelings were to get out of the movie hall in the middle of it!! I mean....I just could not stand it!! Some of the scenes were just too good, no doubt against that fact, but I am not the sci-fi type actually....on top of it..my open seminar had been keeping me really tied up so I needed a break urgently and ended up with this kinda sci-fi break!! amazing is it not!!
How we settled upon this movie in also another interesting story...SNP gang just wanted to go for a movie and so they were searching IMDB and found Watchmen with 8/10 along with 70k votes and simply jumped on the conclusion of watching the Watchmen!!
But whatever, it was kinda good since the company was good :D If SNP is there everything becomes so good!! okey that is it for now!! more later on some other stuff...seyao for now!!
How we settled upon this movie in also another interesting story...SNP gang just wanted to go for a movie and so they were searching IMDB and found Watchmen with 8/10 along with 70k votes and simply jumped on the conclusion of watching the Watchmen!!
But whatever, it was kinda good since the company was good :D If SNP is there everything becomes so good!! okey that is it for now!! more later on some other stuff...seyao for now!!
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Science is....
I read somewhere that "There is nothing called Eureka in science rather it is 'That's funny...'" I feel this is really the truth. I also feel that whosoever is doing science/research can be broadly classified into two categories. One is those who happen to get different, weird, funny results and try to find out the reasons to support that while the other category is,for which "That's funny" approach does not seem to work...they rather feel that whatever observations they get does not violate anything in that area ...I mean nothing different. Simply, followers. So if you have to perform some analysis, no new analysis are welcome, the old ones which others are doing and hence they are, so called, well-established should be employed always.....I guess Phil Brown should focus on these kind of categories now!! :-)
After two years!!
I came to know today evening that there is a florist in the IIT Kanpur campus!!!! Shocked I am really!!! He prepares all kind of decorations, almost anything and everything. This might help all those who are not aware of this!!
Saturday, January 10, 2009
The Naseeruddin Shah Show!!
Date: 4th January, 2009
Venue: CSJM University
Monologue: Ismat Appa ke Naam
The monologue was presented by Naseer, Ratna Pathak Shah i.e. his wife and Neeba shah, their daughter. It comprised of three short stories by Ismat Chugtai. Ismat Appa was an Indian Urdu writer known for her controversial and remarkable stories. The stories presented were "chui mui" i.e. Touch me Not, "Ghunghat" and "Gharwali". The stories were presented in an amazing manner, really. I attended a Monologue for the first time. I admired the story Ghunghat and most importantly admired the way Ratna Pathak Shah presented it to the audience. I had heard Ismat Chugtai's name earlier but didnt know much about her stories. In fact hadnt read them earlier. This story Ghunghat was really humorous but at the same time had a hidden sadness in it. If you actually sit back and analyze, it had a very tragic end. I just hope it was a fiction and not inspired by any real incidence. In short, this story depicted a guy who was a Mughal and had a black complexion (kaale mia), he got married to a very pretty and specifically a white-complexioned lady (called gori-be). His ego (false, obviously) got hurt on his wedding day after overhearing some remarks about kaale-mia getting married to gori-bi and so he didnt see his wife's face his entire life and at the end died when he was just about to see her.
Venue: CSJM University
Monologue: Ismat Appa ke Naam
The monologue was presented by Naseer, Ratna Pathak Shah i.e. his wife and Neeba shah, their daughter. It comprised of three short stories by Ismat Chugtai. Ismat Appa was an Indian Urdu writer known for her controversial and remarkable stories. The stories presented were "chui mui" i.e. Touch me Not, "Ghunghat" and "Gharwali". The stories were presented in an amazing manner, really. I attended a Monologue for the first time. I admired the story Ghunghat and most importantly admired the way Ratna Pathak Shah presented it to the audience. I had heard Ismat Chugtai's name earlier but didnt know much about her stories. In fact hadnt read them earlier. This story Ghunghat was really humorous but at the same time had a hidden sadness in it. If you actually sit back and analyze, it had a very tragic end. I just hope it was a fiction and not inspired by any real incidence. In short, this story depicted a guy who was a Mughal and had a black complexion (kaale mia), he got married to a very pretty and specifically a white-complexioned lady (called gori-be). His ego (false, obviously) got hurt on his wedding day after overhearing some remarks about kaale-mia getting married to gori-bi and so he didnt see his wife's face his entire life and at the end died when he was just about to see her.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
The Mumbai Terror Attack!!!
Who was Sandeep Unnikrishnan? He was an Indian. Neither Maharastrian, North Indian nor South Indian. The 31 year old only-son of a retired ISRO officer. Unfortunately people will always remember who Raj Thackrey is but we will very soon forget who Sandeep Unnikrishnan was!! Heros are to be remembered only on a special day (26/11) but Raj Thackery will be a celebrity always, on news channels, in newspapers and in people's mind too!! Shame on us!!
Friday, March 7, 2008
Another Nature Retraction
Retraction
Nature 452, 120 (6 March 2008) | doi:10.1038/nature06819
Genetic tracing reveals a stereotyped sensory map in the olfactory cortex
Zhihua Zou, Lisa F. Horowitz, Jean-Pierre Montmayeur, Scott Snapper & Linda B. Buck
Nature 414, 173–179 (2001)
This Article described patterns of labelling observed in olfactory cortex when a transneuronal tracer was co-expressed with single odorant receptor genes in the mouse olfactory epithelium. During efforts to replicate and extend this work, we have been unable to reproduce the reported findings. Moreover, we have found inconsistencies between some of the figures and data published in the paper and the original data. We have therefore lost confidence in the reported conclusions. We regret any adverse consequences that may have resulted from the paper's publication.
Nature 452, 120 (6 March 2008) | doi:10.1038/nature06819
Genetic tracing reveals a stereotyped sensory map in the olfactory cortex
Zhihua Zou, Lisa F. Horowitz, Jean-Pierre Montmayeur, Scott Snapper & Linda B. Buck
Nature 414, 173–179 (2001)
This Article described patterns of labelling observed in olfactory cortex when a transneuronal tracer was co-expressed with single odorant receptor genes in the mouse olfactory epithelium. During efforts to replicate and extend this work, we have been unable to reproduce the reported findings. Moreover, we have found inconsistencies between some of the figures and data published in the paper and the original data. We have therefore lost confidence in the reported conclusions. We regret any adverse consequences that may have resulted from the paper's publication.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Great Egypt!
!!Egypt!! It really fascinates me!! I just love to read anything about it and watch anything based upon it!!In the latest National Geographic magazine the main article features "Black Pharaohs" (http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/hubs/latest-features.html). Pharaoh, according to Wikipedia is Egyptian word for king, but for a descriptive definition kindly check the Wikipedia!!
I really admire Egyptians, their idea about immortality, their ways of saying a final goodbye to their Kings and Queens, it really amazes me!!
This bottle of perfume e.g. was found in one of the cemeteries as a gift to one of its King and this amazingly carved pendent (above) designed for a goddess are clearly evident of their values and rich and different culture!!
The first king of Egypt mentioned by name in the Bible is Shishaq, the title pharaoh is prefixed to his name in the Great Dakhla stela—as in Pharaoh Shoshenq—which dates to Year 5 of his reign.
Although over the world wide net there are several ways Pharaohs have been defined.
"http://www.touregypt.net/magazine/masterindex.htm" This is a good website that talks about the history of Egypt and much more!!
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Shiksha Sopan Annual Program
Day & Date : 13th Jan,08 a Beautiful and sunny Sunday.
Event : Shiksha Sopan Annual function by small kids
Place : The GPN Mahavidyalaya, Barasirohi, Kanpur.
Shiksha Sopan was started in 2001 by a bunch of IITK students in order to impart education to the children in the nearby villages, Barasirohi village being one of them. I have joined this group recently and I try to go to one of these centers once a week (although not a very significant amount of time). The kids who generally come to this center includes those who are a regular school-goer and those who are not! There are children of various age groups. I think it ranges from 4-15yrs. I am especially inclined towards the smaller age group, reason being, their innocence, their questions which come without any hesitation, their freedom to show their liking for others, for example one day a small girl simply came over and told me that she likes me a lot. She is very sweet too! I am not being biased but she 'radiates' innocence, really!!
So that Sunday they were all prepared and decked up for the annual function. There were many group dance, drama, fashion show and the occasion was graced by Prof. S Khandekar and his PhD supervisor from Germany. The dramas were very nicely presented on common social issues. It was really great to see small children giving such big messages to the society on social issues.
Great experience for me and a lovely bright Sunday.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Science retracts major Arabidopsis paper
Four out of five authors of a Science paper that the journal called a "breakthrough of the year" in 2005 have retracted it, saying that the data it was based on could not be replicated.
The study, which described the migration of mRNA to initiate flowering, was based on real-time PCR data, which researchers in the Ume￥ Plant Science Center lab where it had been performed found impossible to replicate. According to principle investigator Ove Nilsson, first author Tao Huang had manipulated data, removing certain points and giving increased weight to others.
Huang, the only author not to agree to the retraction, maintains that the data omissions were valid and documented. "Although I can understand and respect Professor Ove Nilsson... I think the retraction for this paper should not happen, [and was] at least immature," Hwang wrote in an E-mail to The Scientist.
The work has been cited in 54 papers according to the ISI Web of Science. "To some extent, some may have been misled," Takashi Araki, a professor at Kyoto University wrote in an E-mail to The Scientist.
"Obviously these have been very difficult times for me and my group," said Nilsson, "And of course, it's a big set-back for the Arabidposis part of our research." But he says his lab has continued to publish on flowering in trees, and found no errors in other subsequent papers. "People realize that we have handled this according to the books. We had discovered this ourselves and we took the necessary steps to correct it," Nilsson said.
For 70 years scientists have known that a signal, the so called florigen, travels from the leaves, which detect such changes as temperature and day-length, to the growing tip of the plant where it initiates flowering, but they hadn't known what that agent was. In August 2005, Huang et al. reported that mRNA of the flowering locus T, or FT gene, travels to the tips, where it is transcribed into FT protein to signal flowering.
When the paper came out, it was well received. Other studies had already shown that plants used RNA in signaling, so when the paper emerged implicating the FT mRNA as a moving element "it was not that surprising," said Brian Ayre a plant biologist at the University of North Texas. But, he said, this retraction could cause a bit of backpeddling for some in the field, since the FT mRNA theory had already made it into several prominent plant textbooks.
Araki said that he and his group were suspicious of the finding when it was first published in part because his group's results showed that the FT protein, rather than mRNA was actually the moving element and partly because of "very small statistical errors in their real-time PCR data," he said. He also mentioned that "the paper seemed to fit too well with the popular textbook knowledge."
Two papers published online in Science this week, one authored by Laurent Corbesier et al, at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, and another by a Shojiro Tamaki et al, from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, indeed indicate that the elusive florigen is the protein product of the FT gene, rather than mRNA. Corbesier's work in Arabidopsis and Tamaki's work in rice both bolster previous work in tomatoes which did not find mRNA, and implicated the potential use of proteins, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Eliezer Lifschitz.
Nilsson told The Scientist he first discovered an anomaly after Huang, a visiting scientist, left his lab to return to China this past September. Another student and a postdoc, wishing to continue Huang's work found data points marked in red that had been removed from the final analysis. Nilsson's lab was unable to reproduce the data and contacted Ume￥ University which resulted in both an internal and external investigation.
Huang said the removed data points were "irrelevant to the experiment," because variable temperatures of a heating plate rendered certain data points invalid. He said he had circulated his results for review, with the anomalous data points marked in red, before he left the lab. He wrote in an E-mail, "None of my fellow labmates thought it was improper to exclude those irrelevant samples at that time." He also mentioned that he had not been contacted by members of the external investigation.
Lars Rask, a professor at the University of Uppsala who was one of the two people who conducted the external evaluation, confirmed that Huang was not interviewed. Instead, the committee evaluated correspondence between Huang and Nilsson after Huang's departure. In an E-mail to The Scientist, Rask wrote, "As far as we could tell from the E-mails, [Huang] realized that there were potential problems in the experiments carried out."
Despite the controversy surrounding Huang's research, the field as a whole may not be tremendously affected. The original Huang paper had not discounted the possibility of an FT protein playing a role. "That left the door wide open," said Colin Turnbull, a co-author of the Corbesier paper. "All we're trying to do as a community is move forward. And FT is definitely important and the fact that it's a protein is just as exciting as if it had been RNA," he said.
The study, which described the migration of mRNA to initiate flowering, was based on real-time PCR data, which researchers in the Ume￥ Plant Science Center lab where it had been performed found impossible to replicate. According to principle investigator Ove Nilsson, first author Tao Huang had manipulated data, removing certain points and giving increased weight to others.
Huang, the only author not to agree to the retraction, maintains that the data omissions were valid and documented. "Although I can understand and respect Professor Ove Nilsson... I think the retraction for this paper should not happen, [and was] at least immature," Hwang wrote in an E-mail to The Scientist.
The work has been cited in 54 papers according to the ISI Web of Science. "To some extent, some may have been misled," Takashi Araki, a professor at Kyoto University wrote in an E-mail to The Scientist.
"Obviously these have been very difficult times for me and my group," said Nilsson, "And of course, it's a big set-back for the Arabidposis part of our research." But he says his lab has continued to publish on flowering in trees, and found no errors in other subsequent papers. "People realize that we have handled this according to the books. We had discovered this ourselves and we took the necessary steps to correct it," Nilsson said.
For 70 years scientists have known that a signal, the so called florigen, travels from the leaves, which detect such changes as temperature and day-length, to the growing tip of the plant where it initiates flowering, but they hadn't known what that agent was. In August 2005, Huang et al. reported that mRNA of the flowering locus T, or FT gene, travels to the tips, where it is transcribed into FT protein to signal flowering.
When the paper came out, it was well received. Other studies had already shown that plants used RNA in signaling, so when the paper emerged implicating the FT mRNA as a moving element "it was not that surprising," said Brian Ayre a plant biologist at the University of North Texas. But, he said, this retraction could cause a bit of backpeddling for some in the field, since the FT mRNA theory had already made it into several prominent plant textbooks.
Araki said that he and his group were suspicious of the finding when it was first published in part because his group's results showed that the FT protein, rather than mRNA was actually the moving element and partly because of "very small statistical errors in their real-time PCR data," he said. He also mentioned that "the paper seemed to fit too well with the popular textbook knowledge."
Two papers published online in Science this week, one authored by Laurent Corbesier et al, at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, and another by a Shojiro Tamaki et al, from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, indeed indicate that the elusive florigen is the protein product of the FT gene, rather than mRNA. Corbesier's work in Arabidopsis and Tamaki's work in rice both bolster previous work in tomatoes which did not find mRNA, and implicated the potential use of proteins, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Eliezer Lifschitz.
Nilsson told The Scientist he first discovered an anomaly after Huang, a visiting scientist, left his lab to return to China this past September. Another student and a postdoc, wishing to continue Huang's work found data points marked in red that had been removed from the final analysis. Nilsson's lab was unable to reproduce the data and contacted Ume￥ University which resulted in both an internal and external investigation.
Huang said the removed data points were "irrelevant to the experiment," because variable temperatures of a heating plate rendered certain data points invalid. He said he had circulated his results for review, with the anomalous data points marked in red, before he left the lab. He wrote in an E-mail, "None of my fellow labmates thought it was improper to exclude those irrelevant samples at that time." He also mentioned that he had not been contacted by members of the external investigation.
Lars Rask, a professor at the University of Uppsala who was one of the two people who conducted the external evaluation, confirmed that Huang was not interviewed. Instead, the committee evaluated correspondence between Huang and Nilsson after Huang's departure. In an E-mail to The Scientist, Rask wrote, "As far as we could tell from the E-mails, [Huang] realized that there were potential problems in the experiments carried out."
Despite the controversy surrounding Huang's research, the field as a whole may not be tremendously affected. The original Huang paper had not discounted the possibility of an FT protein playing a role. "That left the door wide open," said Colin Turnbull, a co-author of the Corbesier paper. "All we're trying to do as a community is move forward. And FT is definitely important and the fact that it's a protein is just as exciting as if it had been RNA," he said.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Rare Thingy here!!
Although 'Plans' do not materialize but sudden thoughts do!! The scene is: some of us are sitting in fac lounge and having tea, time is around 12:30hrs and we are all dying to have good cake (certainly not from ShopC if the condition of "good" is attached).
Suddenly somebody floats the idea of going to Globus again on the same evening!! Some other, floats another "fundoo" idea of making it "right now". Well RIGHT NOW!!! LUNCH and CAKE!!
And the rare thingy is "we all are ready". Ready to leave our quotidians for a day!! Out here!! In Kanpur!! Really a Rare Phenomena it is, believe me :)
We hired a 'Vikram'!!
More later, have some work right now!!! :))
Suddenly somebody floats the idea of going to Globus again on the same evening!! Some other, floats another "fundoo" idea of making it "right now". Well RIGHT NOW!!! LUNCH and CAKE!!
And the rare thingy is "we all are ready". Ready to leave our quotidians for a day!! Out here!! In Kanpur!! Really a Rare Phenomena it is, believe me :)
We hired a 'Vikram'!!
More later, have some work right now!!! :))
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
Woo Suk Hwang
The South Korean stem-cell researcher Woo Suk Hwang has been at the centre of one of the largest investigations of scientific fraud in living memory.
In January 2006, Hwang's home research institution, Seoul National University, delivered a damning report about Hwang's work on cloned human embryos, concluding it was all based on fraudulent data. The revelation has destroyed the best evidence so far that stem cells can be extracted from a clone matched to a specific patient. With Hwang discredited, both the field of therapeutic cloning and the public's trust in science have suffered a serious setback.
Read more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-Suk
Thursday, December 28, 2006
A Scientist's Nightmare: Software Problem Leads to Five Retractions
Until recently, Geoffrey Chang's career was on a trajectory most young scientists only dream about. In 1999, at the age of 28, the protein crystallographer landed a faculty position at the prestigious Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California. The next year, in a ceremony at the White House, Chang received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the country's highest honor for young researchers. His lab generated a stream of high-profile papers detailing the molecular structures of important proteins embedded in cell membranes.
Then the dream turned into a nightmare. In September, Swiss researchers published a paper in Nature that cast serious doubt on a protein structure Chang's group had described in a 2001 Science paper. When he investigated, Chang was horrified to discover that a homemade data-analysis program had flipped two columns of data, inverting the electron-density map from which his team had derived the final protein structure. Unfortunately, his group had used the program to analyze data for other proteins. As a result, on page 1875, Chang and his colleagues retract three Science papers and report that two papers in other journals also contain erroneous structures.
"I've been devastated," Chang says. "I hope people will understand that it was a mistake, and I'm very sorry for it." Other researchers don't doubt that the error was unintentional, and although some say it has cost them time and effort, many praise Chang for setting the record straight promptly and forthrightly. "I'm very pleased he's done this because there has been some confusion" about the original structures, says Christopher Higgins, a biochemist at Imperial College London. "Now the field can really move forward."
The most influential of Chang's retracted publications, other researchers say, was the 2001 Science paper, which described the structure of a protein called MsbA, isolated from the bacterium Escherichia coli. MsbA belongs to a huge and ancient family of molecules that use energy from adenosine triphosphate to transport molecules across cell membranes. These so-called ABC transporters perform many essential biological duties and are of great clinical interest because of their roles in drug resistance. Some pump antibiotics out of bacterial cells, for example; others clear chemotherapy drugs from cancer cells. Chang's MsbA structure was the first molecular portrait of an entire ABC transporter, and many researchers saw it as a major contribution toward figuring out how these crucial proteins do their jobs. That paper alone has been cited by 364 publications, according to Google Scholar.
Read more about this at: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/314/5807/1856
Then the dream turned into a nightmare. In September, Swiss researchers published a paper in Nature that cast serious doubt on a protein structure Chang's group had described in a 2001 Science paper. When he investigated, Chang was horrified to discover that a homemade data-analysis program had flipped two columns of data, inverting the electron-density map from which his team had derived the final protein structure. Unfortunately, his group had used the program to analyze data for other proteins. As a result, on page 1875, Chang and his colleagues retract three Science papers and report that two papers in other journals also contain erroneous structures.
"I've been devastated," Chang says. "I hope people will understand that it was a mistake, and I'm very sorry for it." Other researchers don't doubt that the error was unintentional, and although some say it has cost them time and effort, many praise Chang for setting the record straight promptly and forthrightly. "I'm very pleased he's done this because there has been some confusion" about the original structures, says Christopher Higgins, a biochemist at Imperial College London. "Now the field can really move forward."
The most influential of Chang's retracted publications, other researchers say, was the 2001 Science paper, which described the structure of a protein called MsbA, isolated from the bacterium Escherichia coli. MsbA belongs to a huge and ancient family of molecules that use energy from adenosine triphosphate to transport molecules across cell membranes. These so-called ABC transporters perform many essential biological duties and are of great clinical interest because of their roles in drug resistance. Some pump antibiotics out of bacterial cells, for example; others clear chemotherapy drugs from cancer cells. Chang's MsbA structure was the first molecular portrait of an entire ABC transporter, and many researchers saw it as a major contribution toward figuring out how these crucial proteins do their jobs. That paper alone has been cited by 364 publications, according to Google Scholar.
Read more about this at: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/314/5807/1856
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