Saturday, March 25, 2006

zwynnkathakabow!

b'lore rock fest at ramaiah
the monkey baby outside ACJ
torch + marb les....lost it?
my musiq system!@!!!!

on the train to the my b'lore

atleast if i were to lose my memory..these wud bring back some special moments and ppl back in a hurry.

mo foto

my pretty sweetie from Kottorpuram...gypsy girl.
from my first tryst with digi cams
beadies beadies... narekoravasssss
FRom down ellis road.

FOTOFOTO





like last time i'm just gonna paste some of my pics tgethr randomly!!!!
1) The arrangement of liquers that preetha got from goa...mmmmm.....
2) The monkeys in Kotturpuram's narekorava settlement.
3) tht tree outside du n k's house!!!!!
4) my mommy's yummy fish curryyyyy!!!

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

speedy gonzales


















When the dimensions we see thru don't apply to the machines we make to capture it.... huh? i only got confused.
it's a MAD MAD world...n life is screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaming past u.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

GODDAMNSHIT

can't show u my recent pics cos of some glitch with the comp! DAMN U MONGOLIANS!!! anyways... getting fukked up with investigative project work... n hmmm.... from the top of my head... i'm going deeper undaaground ...there's too much panic in this town... feel the call of the hills... so FREAKING hot here rite now... i'm drying up into a prune... fingers crossed... hope it amounts to something... life is crazy... already feeling that funny feeling about leaving this place n these people behind... hmmmm.... into the great wide open mite just be into another tubelit ( YUCK I HATE WHITE LITE ) office where i have some strange person telling me y i can't badmouth some freaking loser who needs to be told off badly... ON RECORD!!!! who's to say what's to come... just gonna wait ...for it all to come... wow! still have the lit streak in me... hehehe random ramblings of a reasonably ridiculous ridhi.
LATERS...

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

RNA assignment again it's science but i like it :-)

People are so fussy. We complain about everything. We are so hard to satisfy. We spend lifetimes trying to figure ourselves out. But what makes up the physical us – our cells – they are quite different. They don’t fuss half as much. If they did, we’d end up as biological disasters!

One such unfussy character in our body is Ribonucleic Acid – nickname – RNA. RNA is one of those crucial but sometimes overlooked stunt doubles. Without them, the whole show would flop.

Antibodies - the soldiers who fight diseases, hormones – the growth regulators and enzymes - our body’s biochemical catalysts. These are all needed to keep our body clocks ticking on time. They are all made of protein – our cells’ bread and butter. RNA helps produce our daily bread. This is the aim of the show.

Consider one cell to be a house. It has the necessary furniture like mitochondria – the cell’s power house and ribosomes – the work rooms where protein is built from a set of genetic instructions. The nucleus is the living room and our centre stage. This is where Deoxyribonucleic Acid – nickname DNA, plays her lead role of concocting our individuality through genes.

But our fussy protagonist cannot brave the perils of the rest of the house and is confined to the living room (with attached bathroom of course). So RNA restructures herself to become an exact stunt double of DNA. This way the precious, unique… (Well almost) genetic information that DNA contains can reach the outside world. Now RNA can move past the membranous walls of the living room (nucleus) and into the rest of the house with its ‘work rooms,’ especially the ribosomes. RNA transforms into DNA’s double through a process called transcription.

How does she do this? She wears a ‘nucleotide’ cap. She also carries a special enzyme to prolong her life enough to complete her mission. She also sheds her extra baggage – ‘non-coding sequences’, through a process called ‘splicing’ and matures into messenger RNA (mRNA).

The nucleus has a double wall. The only door to the surrounding wild world of cytoplasm (the rest of the house) is through the nuclear pore complex (NPC). So, mRNA gets a protein name tag which is her gate pass out of the nucleus.

This is the final step to the final goal – proteins. A specialized protein molecule called transfer RNA (tRNA) plays the role of translator. He matches mRNA to the right corresponding protein. The cell's protein-making factory - ribosomes take the play to a grand finale. He decodes mRNA and translates her disguise into protein. Proteins are now built based upon the code in the RNA.

The show is now over and the applause has finally died down. DNA takes her final bow and waves to the crowd. She got bored sitting pretty on the couch in the living room. So much like real life. The stunt double did all the action packed stuff and the star got all the roses.

COLONIZATION BY VIRUS: a science assignment

What do the common cold, Lassa fever, Bird Flu and HIV have in common?

- VIRUS.

Amid conspiracy theories of biological warfare and mysterious terms like the ‘antigenic shift’, Dr. Sharath Rai, Principal scientist in his discovery group at the global research-based pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer, is in hot pursuit of vaccines for various viral & bacterial diseases.

He has been working as a senior staff scientist in this US-based company for the past five years. Although his current work is shrouded in secrecy, Rai chatted via the internet with eight Science elective students from the Asian College of Journalism from 8.30 to 9.45 am on Fri 4, 2006.

He explained that Virology captured his interest because it is an area in its ‘infancy’ and thus is one of the ‘cutting edge research areas’. He added later, “May be I had some coveted aspects of research when I was in academia. But once you end up in the pharmaceutical industry, much of your research is driven by business, and you constantly keep changing your areas of research based on the business requirements.”

In response to claims that some pharmaceutical companies hype symptoms (especially psychiatric disorders like depression) because they have developed medicines to cure them, he said, “I do not believe that statement is true. However, that is a hypothetical question and the opinions can vary based on which angles you are looking from itself.”

He then answered a ‘host’ of questions pertaining to the devious nature of our body’s nemesis - the virus. Let’s imagine that the virus is a colonizer seeking to capture a country – the human body.

The virus does so by first conquering individual households – host cells. Thus the entire body plays the unwitting ‘host’ to this greedy guest. He even uses the body’s resources (host cell’s machinery) to clone an army for himself.

As a result, Rai explained how hard it is to give him the boot. “If you target the virus then there is a good chance you will target the host cell as well… Also, viruses constantly evolve to avoid host immune system (best examples are the HIV and the influenza virus). Thus it will be an ongoing fight between research and virus evolution.”

On the virus’ list of crimes, identity theft proves the most troublesome. One must be able to tell enemy clones from native soldiers. So, when screening for chemical compounds virologists have to isolate a particular stage in a virus’ life cycle when it will not harm the host cell.

This is why vaccines - a weakened form of the virus itself, are the most successful battle strategy. It’s like using the weakest clone of the virus to learn the virus’ war strategy. The body uses this to equip herself with the skills needed to kick her uninvited guest out, without harming herself too much.

This is how we managed to protect the human race from colonization by virus. But the fiend doesn’t give up that easy. He then learns to get around the body’s defenses. He launches his most confounding attack. Mutation. If we knew how he would mutate, maybe we could strategize accordingly. But as the good doctor says…

“There are several factors that can impact the viral mutation patterns, and it is different for each virus. Although with the advance of algorithms/mathematics, it is still a very random process. …these tools may help you predict to some extent in the controlled lab environment, but in the real world I would say it is still as unpredictable as ever.

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OH OH!!!
i think we be in trouble yeah???

Thursday, March 02, 2006