Monday, October 27

HAPPY DIWALI

HAPPY DIWALI TO ALL.

Saturday, October 25

Do-It-Yourself Biology

In Drew Endy's world, things are a little different.

There, bacteria run relay races, lie down to create a modern version of the Etch A Sketch® toy, and even work as photographic film.

Though it may sound like a weird world, Endy sees big promise in convincing living things to work as machines and perform useful tasks.

Endy, 35, is a synthetic biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge.

He and other researchers who work in this emerging area of science blend engineering, biology, and computer programming to find out how life works and how we can make it work for us.

"Biology is often thought of as [a mysterious process], where you don't actually know what's going on...or wet, goopy stuff that doesn't feel like it should be like a clock or something with gears and pistons and rods," he explains.

While biological materials and organisms may well be wet and goopy, to Endy they aren't all that different from engine parts. Not because of what they're made of, he says, but because of what they can do. The sheer capacity for innovation in biology is what makes it so cool to him.

And it's definitely cool to his students, as well: Every one of the bacterial tools mentioned above was dreamed up by a college student participating in the International Genetically Engineered Machines, or iGEM, competition that grew out of Endy's synthetic biology class at MIT.

Building Knowledge
Endy is by all accounts an engineer, in thinking and in training. He earned a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

But even then, during a molecular genetics course, Endy's interest turned biological and he became fascinated with the nuts and bolts of living things.

He went on to earn a master's degree in environmental engineering 2 years later, also from Lehigh, and then a Ph.D. in biochemical engineering, this time from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Now, the building materials Endy works with are far from steel and concrete. The parts in his lab "shop" are made of DNA: Endy builds genomes.

Genome is the scientific term for all of the genetic material in an organism. By studying how genome organization creates templates for living things as diverse as people, penguins, and petunias, researchers can get clues about how genes affect health and disease.

For his research, Endy decided to focus on the tiny T7 bacteriophage, a virus that infects bacteria. The T7 genome has been intensively studied for years by researchers interested in questions about how information carried in DNA can cause a cell to reprogram itself, generating new products and behaviors.

To analyze any system, engineers begin by identifying all of its parts and then figuring out how they connect together to produce a functioning whole.

For T7, this work had been done. The organization of the T7 phage genome—or the order in which all of its genes string together—was already known. Scientists had figured out that the phage's genome has only 56 genes, which produce 60 proteins that direct various stages and types of infection.

The T7 genes cluster into several distinct classes, each of which is expressed at a specific point during infection. As the virus infects a bacterium, Endy explains, it has to switch from expressing one class of genes to another in order for the infection to continue and be successful.

One approach to understanding T7 would be to look at its genome and try to pry it apart piece by piece, to investigate the function of each individual gene. But Endy had a different idea.

"It's immediately obvious when you encounter [a] DNA sequence that this is a program, and that you could change it," Endy says.

But decoding the T7 phage "program" proved harder than he thought it would be. Endy's engineering background gave him a new strategy.

"The biological systems that we find in nature are not themselves designed by nature to be easy to understand. And so if I wanted to have biology that I understand," Endy recalls thinking, "I'd be better off building it myself."

"You might try to understand a car, or a bicycle, by taking it apart and having the pieces all over your lawn," says Endy, "But you're going to have a much better understanding of a car or a bicycle if you take the bits and pieces and put them together to build one from scratch."

Programming Life
Synthetic biologists like Endy are driven by their desire to understand life's design rules, because this knowledge would make biological processes much more predictable.

In turn, the hope is, we'll all be better off. Knowing the rules of biology—and how the rules get broken in the early stages of disease—would provide the opportunity to implement health interventions well before symptoms appear, when the chance for cure is highest.

"How do we get to some future where the programming of living systems is as simple, understandable, and reliable as computers are today?" Endy asks.

It also doesn't hurt that Endy has a driving need to solve problems.

"When I don't understand how things work, I'm curious," he explains. "It bothers me."

So he went to work rebuilding the T7 genome from its parts. His goal was to construct a stripped-down, functional version of the genome that would be easy to understand.

The idea is that if he could build a version of T7 that works like the real thing, it would be a great step toward understanding the entire biological machine. And then Endy could simultaneously test each part of his synthetic, model genome.

When Endy thought about how to construct his own T7, he decided to equip it not only with the viral genes it needs to survive, but also with "cut-and-paste" sites in the DNA that would make it easy to change the phage's genetic program. That means scientists could add new DNA sequences, deactivate genes, or measure the activity or expression of any particular gene.

"Building is a great way to learn," says Endy, explaining that failure just means more experiments.

In 2005, Endy succeeded in partially redesigning the T7 phage. His lab creation, called T7.1, could perform just as well as the original.

Part of the effort, Endy explains, involved untangling some overlapping genes. This genetic handiwork, he says, will enable other scientists to manipulate parts of the T7 genome that could never before be separated in the real virus.

But in truth, T7.1 was only a partial redesign, because Endy was unsure of how many changes T7 could tolerate at one time. Following on the success of the first effort, researchers in Endy's lab are working on a new genome, T7.2. This one, he says, will have even more tools to make it user-friendly for other molecular builders.

For all his building enthusiasm and excitement for figuring out biology, Endy has other passions, unrelated to science.

What would he do if he weren't building genomes? To this, Endy simply shrugs.

"[I'd probably be] surfing...writing poetry and surfing. But probably in the other order."

Communication Breakdown
As Endy continued his work retooling the T7 genome, he grew frustrated that biological engineering didn't seem to be evolving like other engineering disciplines. For example, a mechanical engineer can pick up a screw and know exactly what size and shape it is, he says, but many genetic devices are designed only to work in the research lab in which they were made.

"It'd be like having an MP3 player that you could only hook up to your computer and your stereo," Endy explains, "whereas what you'd like is to have an MP3 player that could be hooked up to any computer and any stereo."

Through some trial-and-error efforts, Endy and his coworkers did discover a standardized way to get molecular machines to talk the same language. But what proved more difficult, he says, was trying to teach the language to new students.

The solution to this problem turned out to be, of all things, humor.

While attending a meeting in Los Angeles, California, Endy wore a name tag with a picture of one of his genetic gizmos. Out of the blue, one of the other attendees at the conference asked him to explain his image.

It didn't turn out quite as well as Endy might have hoped.

"I tell him the story about how a genetically encoded inverter works," Endy remembers. "I finish my story, and he goes, 'That sucks!'"

The man's harsh words took Endy by surprise until he realized that the guy had a point. The image needed way too much explanation to be understood clearly.

The man went on to suggest that a comic strip might get the message across. Endy laughingly recalls wondering at the time who in the world this person he was talking to might be.

As it turned out, the man who verbally accosted Endy was Larry Gonick, author of The Cartoon Guide to Genetics.

When Endy returned to Boston after the meeting, he got to work sketching a draft of the comic strip. But his assistant, who also happens to be a screenwriter, wasn't impressed. In fact, she responded with criticism similar to Gonick's.

"She happened to know the guy who does the storyboards for Spider-Man," remembers Endy, adding that they convinced the artist, Chuck Wadey, to do some drawings.

The result was the comic book Adventures in Synthetic Biology. In the first issue, boy scientist "The Dude" and his wisecracking teacher navigate the tricky terrain of synthetic biology and sum up all of its principles in living color.

On the Same Page
Endy's comic helped establish a way for scientists to talk the same synthetic biology language, but he knew that another key step would be finding a common place to keep all the parts so researchers could easily find and use them. It would not be an actual warehouse, but rather a common framework for organizing all the components of biological machines.

That amounts to a registry, or database, where everyone can find information and detailed descriptions about how to use that information. The Registry of Standard Biological Parts, which Endy helped to establish, keeps track of genetic components the way an engineer might keep track of machine parts or electrical circuit diagrams.

A single genetic "part" could be made up of several related and interacting genes. Endy's hope is that the tools for biological engineering become so advanced that someone with little or no biology background could still build a useful, living organism from off-the-shelf parts.

Endy likens the situation to household appliances.

Imagine if, in order to use a television, you had to know how every wire and tube functioned, and why only certain ones could connect to certain others.

Luckily for us, watching television is no more complicated than switching on the set.

"My motivation is that years from now, anybody who wants to [can] dream up a useful biological system and pull it off, without having to go through this whole big research process to do it," Endy explains.

Others have already begun to use the biological parts in the registry Endy set up: that's how students made the bacterial machines that create living photos and run relay races. Those projects emerged from the iGEM competition, which Endy helped launch in 2004.

In the summer of 2006, 37 different schools from around the world registered teams of undergraduates to engineer biological machines for the iGEM competition held last November. Participating students came not just from U.S. schools, but from all over the world. The contest hosted teams from the United Kingdom, Spain, India, Japan, and Slovenia, the 2006 grand-prize winners.

The Future Is Now
By bringing together undergraduates to engineer biology, the iGEM competition is a community teaching tool. It inspires students to try new combinations and build amazing genetic machines with standard biological parts.

Endy says what's really neat about the living photographic film, for instance, isn't what it can do, but how it was made.

"[The bacterial film] was doubly cool because [the students] made the system out of some of the components that we already had...a novel combination of off-the-shelf parts."

In a cutting-edge field like synthetic biology, even the professors learn something new with each competition.

Endy continues to teach in innovative ways, and he has won awards for his creative educational approaches. Through his teaching and research, Endy aims to change the way biologists and engineers think about and use biology.

Basically, he wants engineers to see biology as just another way to build things.

"If you ask engineers what they want to do in their hearts, they want to make something," Endy says. He hopes to attract more engineers into synthetic biology by teaching them what they can make and how they can make it.

And as far as Endy's concerned, there's nowhere else he'd rather be.

"I'm doing what I want to be doing, and if I wasn't, I would change it," Endy says. "If at some point in the future, I'd rather be raising pheasants in southern France, or in northern France...or wherever they raise pheasants in France, I presume I would go do that."

"I don't see what I'm doing as work," he declares.


http://www.utexas.edu/opa/media/051123photos.php

Saturday, October 18

Great sachin Tendulkar


Akash chopra shares his experiences about his idol on BBC


couple of decades ago when I started playing cricket I, like everyone else in India at the time, wanted to be the next Sunil Gavaskar.

A couple of years of watching and playing cricket changed it all. And let me assure you that it was not just I who found a new idol, the whole of India had found a new hero too.


He is someone who was born to play cricket
A young kid of 15 stormed on to the international scene and completely took over the imagination of the millions of cricket-crazy people.

This guy was Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar.

Now, every kid, including me, wanted to be like him. It holds true even now, without realising that geniuses like Sachin are not made but born.

Little did I know then that I would get an opportunity to share a dressing room with the man himself.

Modest man

The first time I met him was when I was picked to play for India against New Zealand.


Tendulkar on his Test debut

Tendulkar's career in pictures
I will be honest: I was in awe of him and could not strike a conversation beyond exchanging a few formal pleasantries.

He being what he is, an extremely humble and modest man, sensed it and did his best to make me feel at home.

He asked me about how Vettori and the rest had bowled in the warm-up games. I knew that he did it to get me involved and help settle my nerves. And it worked.

I cannot write anything about Sachin's batting that has not been written ad nauseam.

His immaculate balance at the crease sets him apart and his insatiable hunger for runs is keeping him going, strong as ever.

He is someone who was born to play cricket and inspire millions to follow and take up the game.

Yet, there is much more to the man than what we get to see on television.

Some lesser known things about him also help define the person he really is. For example, he is always the first one to get into the team bus at the start of the day.

Everyone gets delayed from time to time and often someone with his seniority and stature would tend to take things for granted and relax on regularity and trivial effort.

With time and seniority one gets into a comfort zone and that is what triggers one's downfall. Sachin, perhaps, realised that right at the beginning and kept the complacency at bay.

Sleepless nights

Once I got a bit more comfortable around him, I started picking his brains.

The "Little Master" has become an idol for Indian youth
I asked him about how he prepares for a big match. He said that his preparation is always the same regardless of the importance of the occasion.

But sometimes even he gets carried away. On one such instance he did not sleep for 15 consecutive nights. That was before the India-Pakistan match in the 2003 World Cup.

The thoughts of how to handle every bowler, and working out strategies against the likes of Shoaib and co, kept him awake.

One must not forget that he was actively involved and scoring heavily in the games prior to that one, and all that without adequate sleep.

He went on to score 90-odd in that game, and many rate that knock off as one of his best ever.

Then there was Sydney, 2004. He was short of form and runs in the series and almost everyone was taking pot shots at him saying how he was past his prime and how he was not the same threat any more.

I found it a little over the top, but there was little I could do about it.


He has carried the hopes and dreams of a billion cricket-crazy people on his shoulders
In that particular series, I was getting a few forties and was praised to the heavens, but Sachin was getting crucified for getting the same number of runs.

He was not out of form and we sensed that a big one was just round the corner.

I would see him fiddling with his bat for hours, shadow practising a particular shot that he was getting out to, fishing outside the off-stump.

He went on to score a big unbeaten double hundred in that game and I did not find anything unusual about it - scoring runs for him is routine - until he asked me if I noticed something different.

He told me that he did not play a single cover drive in his innings and I was shocked.

I was oblivious to the fact that he curbed his instincts not only at the beginning but even after he was well set.

Flag bearer


Tendulkar has always "kept the complacency at bay"
He did not allow the ego to come in his way and went about doing his job carefully and methodically, once again silencing his stupefied critics.

For the last 19 years the Little Master, as he has come to be known, has carried the hopes and dreams of a billion cricket-crazy people on his shoulders and has rarely let them down.

His record means a world to all of us who have followed the fortunes of the Indian team over the years.

He has been the flag bearer of the sport in this country and has been greatly instrumental in making cricket as big as it is at the moment, not just in India, but all over the world.

Wednesday, October 15

new macs from apple!!!!

pple has announced its new range of MacBooks and its first LED backlit Cinema Display at a press conference at its Cupertino headquarters.

The company presented new 13.3" MacBook and 15.4" MacBook Pro designs – the chassis are, like the rumours suggested, built from a solid block of aluminium.

There were two new MacBook Pro models announced, both featuring a 15.4" LED-backlit display with a glossy covering that will undoubtedly split opinion down the middle. What's more there's no matte option available with any of the new MacBooks – it's clearly going to be a love-it-or-hate-it affair.

The priciest model comes in at £1,749 (inc. VAT) and features a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo (6MB L2 cache), 4GB of DDR3 1,066MHz memory, a 320GB hard drive, a GeForce 9400M integrated graphics chipset and a GeForce 9600M GT 512MB discrete graphics card.

The cheaper MacBook Pro comes in at £1,399 (inc. VAT) and features a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo (3MB L2 cache), 2GB of DDR3 1,066MHz memory, a 250GB hard drive, a GeForce 9400M IGP and a GeForce 9600M GT 256MB discrete graphics card.

Both weigh 2.5kg, feature a pair of USB 2.0 ports, a Firewire 800 port, a mini-DisplayPort socket, Gigabit Ethernet, integrated 802.11n WiFi, a built-in iSight camera and everything else you'd come to expect. There's one thing you won't be familiar with though, and that's the button-less multi-touch glass trackpad – there are no buttons and you tap the trackpad instead of clicking a trackpad button.


The new 15.4" MacBook Pro

These are undoubtedly expensive notebooks though and definitely not for everyone – for those with thinner wallets, Apple has updated the MacBook range with a design that's very similar to the new 15.4" MacBook Pros.

The cheapest of the two MacBooks comes in at £949 (inc. VAT), which raises the entry-level bar for Apple's notebooks. The company has, however, kept the old White MacBook in its range at a reduced price of £719 in order to fill the void at the bottom of Apple's range.

The new entry level MacBook still uses a 13.3" LED-backlit display (complete with the same glass cover as the new MacBook Pros) and comes with a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of DDR3 1,066MHz memory, a 160GB hard drive and a GeForce 9400M integrated graphics chipset. The more expensive MacBook comes with a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo and a 250GB hard drive – the rest of the specs remain the same. The price increase for these upgrades is a cool £200 once you factor in the tax man's cut.


The new 13.3" MacBook

Like the new MacBook Pros, the MacBooks feature a pair of USB 2.0 ports, a Firewire 800 port, a mini DisplayPort socket along with Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11n wireless networking and a built-in iSight camera. The new models weigh almost a quarter of a kilo less than the older MacBook at just over 2kg and they're also thinner as well at 24mm.

There was also an updated MacBook Air announced, but nearly all of the flaws with the initial design remain. The only notable changes are the upgrade to Nvidia GeForce 9400M integrated graphics and the decision to swap out the mini-DVI connector for mini-Displayport. There are also bigger hard drives (using SATA instead of IDE this time) and Apple has moved the Air to DDR3 like the newer MacBooks, but that's about all that has changed.

Interestingly, despite Steve Jobs essentially announcing the death of Ethernet when he unveiled the MacBook Air, both the MacBook and MacBook Pro sport Gigabit Ethernet sockets. The other annoyance for me is the inclusion of a mini DisplayPort connector – there's simply no reason for it whatsoever, other than to coax people into buying either an adapter (mini DisplayPort to dual-link DVI costs in the region of £70, for what it's worth) or buying one of Apple's new 24" LED Cinema Displays.

Speaking of which, this was the surprise announcement during the keynote – but it was long-overdue. This has a characteristically sleek design, features LED backlighting, a glass (glossy) cover a 1,920 x 1,200 native resolution, built in stereo speakers, a USB 2.0 port, a mini DisplayPort connector and a MagSafe power connector for charging your MacBook. This won't come cheap at almost £650 (inc. VAT) but it does look pretty nice – the question is whether it actually performs as well as it looks.

On the whole, I'm a little disappointed with the announcements in some respects – my biggest disappointment is the increased barrier for entry. The other major disappointment for me is the inclusion of the mini DisplayPort connector – there's plenty of room for a full-sized DisplayPort socket, but that'd mean Apple can't fleece even more money out of those wanting to use a non-Apple display. Sure, it won't fit on the MacBook Air, but frankly anyone buying a notebook with such a flawed set of connectivity options afforded by the form over function design should be fleeced for as much as possible in my opinion.

With that said, there are some good trends – I like the fact Apple has included a decent GPU (even if it's integrated) in all of its notebooks, as it could signal Apple's intention to really harness the power of the GPU with its drive behind OpenCL. The designs look stunning as well, but I'm still concerned with their robustness when it comes to accidental spillages – I doubt the keyboard is splash proof, for example.

Thursday, October 9

Nokia launches touchphone 5800 XpressMusic

Nokia is shortly launching the 5800 XpressMusic which is touted to be the counterpart of Apple iphone. The phone will reportedly be released in seven countries before Christmas and the contry list includes Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Russia, Spain, Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates.



The Nokia 5800 will feature a 3.2 Megapixel camera along with Carl Zeiss lens as well as 8GB internal memory, a virtual QWERTY keyboard a graphic equaliser, and built-in surround sound stereo speakers.

Nokia’s touchscreen phone will be launched in India in the third week of November and supposedly will cost around Rs 20,000. Nokia India managing director D Shivakumar said, “What iPhone did was to bring the touch element to a multi-media converged device. Since we are already the leader in converged devices in India, Nokia 5800 will be a revolutionary launch from our stable.”

Wednesday, October 8

'Glowing' jellyfish grabs Nobel

A clever trick borrowed from jellyfish has earned two Americans and one Japanese scientist a share of the chemistry Nobel Prize.
Martin Chalfie, Roger Tsien and Osamu Shimomura made it possible to exploit the genetic mechanism responsible for luminosity in the marine creatures.
Today, countless scientists use this knowledge to tag biological systems.
These glowing markers will show how brain cells develop or cancer cells spread through tissue.
Jellyfish will glow under blue and ultraviolet light because of a protein in their tissues. Scientists refer to it as green fluorescent protein, or GFP.
Shimomura made the first critical step, isolating GFP from a jellyfish found off the west coast of North America in 1962. He made the connection also with ultraviolet light.
Meanwhile in the 1990s, Chalfie demonstrated GFP's value "as a luminous genetic tag", as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences described it in the Nobel citation.
Tsien's contribution was to further "our general understanding of how GFP fluoresces." In essence, he broadened the colour palette to colours other than green. This was significant because it has allowed scientists to follow a number of different biological processes at once.
GFP has now become a standard laboratory tool. As well as assisting fundamental research in simply revealing how biological systems work, it has become invaluable in the domain of genetic engineering.
Scientists trying to modify a plant or animal will often include the gene responsible for GFP as part of the change. Fluorescence will then tell them if the modification has been taken up successfully or not, dramatically improving the efficiency of the research.
It is this science which has led to the stream of popular media stories down the years of "glowing" rabbits, butterflies, pigs - and all the other green-tinged animals to emerge from laboratories.
Just how far colouring techniques have come was demonstrated eloquently last year by a team led from Harvard University.
The group used a combination of multiple fluorescent proteins to colour brain cells (neurons) in up to 90 distinct colours. They published a stunning image in the journal Nature which they called a "brainbow".
Osamu Shimomura is affiliated to the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, US. Martin Chalfie is at Columbia University, New York; and Roger Tsien's home institution is the University of California, San Diego. They share the prize equally.
The Nobel Prizes - which also cover physics, medicine, literature, peace and economics (more properly called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize) - are valued at 10m Swedish Kronor (£800,000; $1.4m).
Laureates also receive a medal and a diploma.

intrepid is coming!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!