Science and Curiosity

Innovating with Organ-on-a-Chip technology. It is well known that patients responds very uniquely to various drugs and chemicals. For instance, a drug may be effective for a patient while it makes another one more ill. For a long time, we had no test to check the effects and response of these medicine or line of treatment individually for each patient . Patient-on-a-Chip holds the potential to advance the field of precision medicine and provide  clinicians with better information which can accurately predict patient's response to medications and treatment.    Organ-on-a-Chip technology can be used to recapitulate true-to-life biology outside the human body. These advanced systems can create micro-environment where cells exhibit unprecedented level of biological functions and facilitates control over complex human biology and disease mechanism which arduous with other techniques.  Scientist can harvest cells from the skin or blood of the patient. These cells...

Animal models provide great complexity compared to simple cell culture, but still, they struggle in recapitulating the human  physiology. Despite these shortcomings, animal models have been continuously used for preclinical studies for over a century.     For a significant amount of time, preference for animal models was a necessity as they were the best options for preclinical trials. However, with advancements in microfabrication technology, microfluidic Organ-on-a-Chip has started to offer excellent alternatives in recent years. Organ-on-Chip systems use human tissues from patients. Hence, they can more accurately mimic the numerous in-vivo human physiological mechanisms, which brings us closer to personalized medicine. As many as 90% of drugs entering human clinical trials fail to get approval from the FDA. Sometimes they are not much effective, and many a time, they are toxic. The preclinical models should be able to identify these lacunas even before these drug...

We have sequenced the human genome, eradicated smallpox, and even found a vaccine for emerging diseases like Covid-19 in record time. But after billions of dollars in research, we haven't found a solution for a disease that affects more than 14 million people and their families at any given time.  Why is it so difficult to cure cancer? Cancer arises as normal cells start to mutate. Most of the time, cells can detect mutations or DNA damage and either fix them or self-destruct. However, mistakes happen; some mutations allow cancerous cells to grow unchecked, invade nearby tissues, or even metastasize to distant organs. Cancers become almost incurable once they metastasize, And cancer is incredibly complex. It's not just one disease! There are more than 100 different types, and we don't have magic meds that can cure all of them. For most cancers, treatments usually include a combination of surgery to remove tumors and radiation and chemotherapy to kill any cancerous cells lef...

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges we face today, and the stakes could not be higher. The world has become keenly aware of the problem, and around the world, people are setting goals to solve it. To avoid the worst effects of a warming world- which will be catastrophic-humans need to stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.  Since 1850 global average temperature has risen by 1 degree Celsius. That may not sound like a significant number, but it is.  Why? Let's find out. One degree is average. Many places on earth have gotten much warmer than that. Some areas in the Arctic have already warmed by 4 degrees. If the global average temperature increases by one more degree (total increase of 2 degrees), the coldest nights in the Arctic might get ten degrees warmer, and the warmest days in Mumbai might get 5 degrees hotter.  Wonder how do we get here? Everything we do is related to fossil fuels: Coal, Oil, and Gas, which are full of carbon that releases carbo...

 Paperfuge is an assemblage of paper and strings. Inspired by the design of millenia-old toy, Paperfuge is a handpowered centrifuge that can spin biological samples at thousands of revolutions per minute (rpm). But unlike a centrifuge, Paperfuge does not require electricity, complicated machinery, maintenance or even money to operate. Paperfuge is an ultra-low cost human powered centrifuge. " There are a billion people on this planet who live with no electricity, no infrastructure, no roads and they have the same kind of health care needs that you and I have " Manu Prakash says, whose lab at Stanford developed centrifuge with these people in mind.  Paperfuge can whip blood into circles at up to 125,00 rpm, which is enough to separate plasma from the blood sample in just 90 seconds. Paperfuge produces a force of 30,000 Gs. Manu Prakash says, " To the best of my knowledge it's the fastest spinning object by human power " A centrifuge is critical for detecting dise...

 Foldscope is an ultra-affordable paper microscope which can be folded with a sheet of paper.  Foldscope is created with a vision to solve the accessibility problem in Science. It is designed to be portable and durable while performing on par with conventional research microscopes ( 140X magnification and 2 micron resolution ). Foldscope which began as a simple idea has now grown into a company that provides low cost tools to communities around the world to discover the world around and interpret it their own way.  A foldscope is an optical microscope that can be assembled using simple components like sheet of papers and lens. It is developed by Manu Prakash and designed to cost less than US$1 to build. It is the part of the frugal science movement which aims to make cheap and easy tools available for scientific use in the developing world. The mission is to break down the price barrier between people and the curiosity and the excitement of scientific exploration! With t...

 Science is not just about knowing but also about experiencing.  Today with the boon of technological advancement we have easy access to information and knowledge which is merely a click away. Science is largely about learning and it comes through the experience. So, it's more important how you can make the experience of science more accessible to a lot of people around the world.  The actual experience of science is utilizing scientific tools to make your own discoveries. Prof. Manu Prakash at Stanford University is in a quest of how can we make scientific tools that are so affordable, which are like buying a pencil from a shop, So what it would mean if a scientific tool is as accessible as pencil? What you would actually do, would you sketch with it or would you write a poetry with it, what exactly is the end of that for science? Prakash Lab do this in different fields but mainly focusing on the microscopic world. So how do you make the microscopic world easily visible,...

  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...