chakravarthy

With youth overwhelmingly voting in favour of Narendra Modi in the 2014 elections, Congress and Left parties are still smarting under the humiliating defeat handed down to them and seem determined to use every dirty trick to distort truth, mislead the nation and woo the younger generation by unleashing the NDA government. No doubt, facts are sacred and comments are free. But it is not only preposterous but unimaginable for responsible political parties to indulge in a slanderous campaign based on untruths by using two recent happenings: the tragic suicide of Rohith Vemula at Hyderabad Central University (HCU) and the blatanatly anti-national event organised in the garb of a cultural evening at JNU. The apparent motive of Congress and Left parties is to hijack public discourse and create social unrest and dimension at a time when the government is straining every sinew to make the economy vibrant and bring it out of the deep morass created by the decade-long scam-tainted UPA rule. W...

For the first time, biologists have succeeded in growing human stem cells in pig embryos, shifting from science fiction to the realm of the possible the idea of developing human organs in animals for later transplant. The approach involves generating stem cells from a patient's skin, growing the desired new organ in a large animal like a pig, and then harvesting it for transplant into the patient's body. Since the organ would be made of a patient's own cells, there would be little risk of immune rejection. The human-organ growing pigs would be examples of chimeras, animals composed of two different genomes. They would be generated by implanting human stem cells into an early pig embryo, resulting in an animal composed of mixed pig and human cells. A team of biologists, led by Jun Wu and Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte at the Salk Institute, US, has shown that human stem cells can contribute to forming the tissues of a pig, despite the ninety million years of evolution betwee...

Can women be brilliant? Little girls are not so sure. A study published in the Journal of 'Science'suggest that girls as young as six can be led to believe men are inherently smarter and more talented than women, making girls less motivated to pursue novel activities or ambitious careers. That such stereotypes exist is hardly a surprise, but the findings show these biases can affect children at a very young age. "As a society, we associate a high level of intellectual ability with males more than females, and our research suggests that this association is picked up by children as young as 6 and 7", said Andrei Cimpian, Associate Professor in the Psychology Department at New York University. Cimpian co-authored the study, which looked at 400 children aged between 5 to 7 years. In the first part of the study, girls and boys were told a story about a person who is "really, really smart", a child's idea of brilliance, and then asked to identify that person...

NASA's Curiosity rover has detected boron for the first time on the surface of Mars, which indicates that the ground water may have possibly been suitable for hosting microbial life in the past. "If the boron that we found in calcium sulphate mineral veins on Mars is similar to what we see on Earth, it would indicate that the ground water of ancient Mars that formed these veins would have been 0-60 degrees celsius and neutral-to-alkaline pH", said Patrick Gasda, a post-doctoral researcher  at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The temperature, pH, and dissolved mineral content of the ground water could make it habitable. The Boron, mainly associated with arid sites where much water has evaporated away, was identified by the rover's Chemcam instrument. Scientists are considering at least two possibilities for the source of Boron: It could be that the drying out of part of Gale lake resulted in a boron-containing deposit in an overlying layer. Some of the material from t...

Scientists have discovered why humans do not have a penis bone, unlike chimpanzees, bears and most other mammals. The penis bone, or baculum, first evolved in mammals around 145 and 95 million years ago, according to new research from University College, London. The study's lead author Matilda Brindle told The Independent one of the reasons humans had lost their penis bone was because we do not have sex for long enough to need one. "The common ancestors of both primates and carnivores had a baculum", she said. "Humans are quiet weird as we are one of the few primates that doesn't have one". Primates who mate for three minutes or more tend to have far longer penis bones than those whose intromission, or vaginal penetration, is below three minutes, she said. "The human intromission duration tends to be below two minutes, which most people wouldn't expect". In contrast, the aye-aye, a nocturnal lemur, copulates for around an hour at a time and h...

September 28 marks the anniversary of the discovery of penicillin by Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming. According to the story, on that morning in 1928, Fleming discovered that a petri dish of Staphylococcus bacteria that had been inadvertently left out on the windowsill of his London laboratory had become contaminated by a greenish-coloured mold - and encircling the mold was a halo of inhibited bacterial growth. After taking a sample and developing a culture, Fleming discovered that the mold was a member of the Penicillium genus, and the rest, as they say, is history. Penicillin wasn't the only unintentional discovery in history, of course. From kids' toys to artificial sweeteners, all eight of these everyday items were invented entirely by accident. Corn Flakes : The two Kellog brothers - Dr. John Harvey Kellog and his younger brother (and former broom salesman) Will Keith Kellog - worked at Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, where John was the physician-in-chief. Bo...

It is known as one of the 'happy hormones' and its discovery led to the development of what were hailed as depression 'wonder drugs' like Prozac. But despite being prescribed as a treatment for anxiety, these 'SSRI' drugs designed to boost levels of serotonin (a happy hormone) in the brain had a strange and mysterious side-effect. In some cases, they initially made people feel more anxious or even suicidal. Now, a new study, published in the Journal Nature, has found that contrary to the popular view serotonin only promotes good feelings, it also has a darker side. US researchers delivered a mild shock to the paws of mice and found this activated neurons that produce serotonin in an area of the brain known to be involved in mood and depression. Increasing these neurons' activity appeared to make the mice anxious. Using sophisticated equipment to monitor the mice's brain, the scientists from North Carolina University's medical school then mapped w...