Science and Curiosity

  Alzeimer's Disease Over a century ago a german doctor, Alois Alzeimer spotted anamolies in brain section of patient with dementia. Ever since people have been studying the plaques and tangles that he saw in the hope that one day we could understand and cure what is now known as the Alzeimer's Disease (AD) which is most common Neurodegenerative disease. Plaques are insoluble peptide called Amyloid beta (A-beta) which are formed when Amyloid Precursor Protein are cleaved by certain enzymes. Abeta is considered as the main culprit for AD. Abeta tends to misfold and sticky eventually clumping together to form oligomers. Some of which aggregate into large insoluble fibrils that deposit in the brain as plaques. Oligomers can be toxic, research shows they can weaken communication and plasticity at synapse. This could be what stops brain from forming or retrieving memories. Neuron's aren't the only cells affected in AD, astrocytes and microglia also play a role. Microglia ar...

Do you get Stressed out? Don't worry. We've all been there. Stress isn't always a bad thing. It can be handy for a burst of extra energy and focus like while playing a game or speaking in public. But when it's continuous, the kind like what we face day in and day out, it actually begins to change your brain. Chronic stress can affect brain size, its structure and how it functions right down to the genetic level. Stress begins with what is called the Hypothalamus Pituitary Adrenal axis (HPA), a series of interaction between the pituitary gland on the brain and the kidney, which controls the body's reaction to stress. When your brain detects a stressful situation your HPA axis is activated and releases a hormone called Cortisol which triggers the body for instant action. However, high levels of cortisol over high period of time are fatal for our brain. Chronic stress increases the activity level and number of neural connections in amygdala, brain's fear center. As...

In flow there is no room for self scrutiny. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi You can have a big house, a great car, a lot of money and still not happy, because that's just not how happiness works. According to a data, personal income tripled but it really didn't affect how happy people were. A person can make himself happy or miserable regardless of what is actually happening outside, just by changing the contents of consciousness . So, how can we change the contents of consciousness? One of the best way to do that is to put ourselves in the state of the optimal experience called the Flow. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described this term, Flow in detail in his book. He describe flow as, " The state in which people ares o involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter ". He says that, concentration is so intense that no attention is leftover for anything irrelevant to that particular activity. Self-consciousness disappears and the time becomes distorted.  We generally e...

Sleep occupies nearly a third of our lives, but many of us give surprisingly little attention to it. This neglect is often the result of major misunderstandings. Sleep isn't lost time or a way to rest when all of our work is done. Instead, it's a critical function during which our body balances and regulates vital systems, affecting respiration and controlling right from circulation, growth, and immune response.  But, we care more about that test which we have tomorrow morning, right? One should certainly not; it turns out that sleep is also very crucial for the brain, with a fifth of the body's circulatory blood being channeled to it when you are drift off. And, what goes on in our brain while we sleep is an intensely active period of restructuring, which is crucial for memory function.  According to psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus, we usually forget 40% of new material within the first 20 minutes, known as the forgetting curve. But fortunately, this loss can be prevented b...

The Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded for the Improbable Research. WHAT?? Improbable Research is the research that makes people laugh and then think. Real Research, about anything and everything, from everywhere. Research that may be good or bad, important or trivial, valuable or worthless.  WHY?? The goal is to make people  LAUGH  and then  THINK.  I hope to   spur   people's curiosity and raise the question:  How do you decide what's essential and what's not and what's real and what's not - in science and everywhere else? "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but. That's funny" - Issac Asimov . The Ig Nobel Prize The Ig Nobel Prize is a satiric prize awarded to celebrate ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research, with the aim being to honor achievements that first make you laugh and then think. The name of the award prize is the pun to the Nobel Prize, which it parodies...

 We come across numerous different types of materials which behaves quite surprisingly. For instance behavior of water, oil, ketchup, blood, peanut butter, curd, cosmetics, cement paste etc. is very different. A material can flow at one instance and the same material will act as a solid at the other instance. These are general materials which we use in our mundane life, but we fail to appreciate their amazing properties and behavior. You might wonder if I make a statement that, "Everything you look around has a potential to flow, yeah right... Everything!!"  Whenever we study the flow behavior of any material then the most important thing to look forward is timescale. The timescale of occurrence of the process to the timescale of our observation governs the flow interpretation. This ratio is scientifically termed as the Debroah Number (De). Each material has it's own timescale of response to an applied deformation and that depends on the structural complexities. When the...

Organized data has much importance as many organizations, research, and nations decide by interpretation of this data. But there exists a problem with that; any set of statistics might have something lurking inside. Something which can change the results totally, upside down. For example, imagine that you need to choose a hospital for a relative's surgery from Hospitals A and B. Data so far shows, out of 1000 patients admitted in Hospitals, 900 survived (900/1000) in hospital A while 800 survived (800/1000) in hospital B. So, it looks like Hospital A is a better choice.  But remember, not all patients arrive at the hospital with the same level of health. If we divide the hospital's last one thousand patients in good and poor health, the picture seems completely different.  Hospital A had only 100 patients who arrived in poor health, out of which only 30 survived (30/100), but hospital B had 400, and they were able to save 210 (210/400). So, hospital B is a better choice for pe...