Trolled by the cryoscopic effect

Refers to the depression of the freezing point of a solution due to the presence of some solute, or impurity. This does not depend on the nature of the impurity, just on its relative amount w.r.t the solvent. So, this means that the equivalent amount of potassium chloride and sodium chloride will lead to the same depression of the freezing point of water. Which is, of course why the put some salt in the water pipes in North East India, where it is cold. Also why they put ethanol/glycerol as antifreeze in car radiators.

Here is the Wikipedia page. Observe that the cryoscopic constant of water is K=1.86 C/M. Assuming a van't Hoff factor of i=1 for glycerol, for a 20% mass/vol solution, that comes to a comcentration of 2M. So, the maximum freezing point depression should be about 4 C. Which means that the cell stock should have thawed at -4C. And when I grabbed the cells from the -80 C freezer, I should have scraped some off and stuck them back in pronto. Not left them on the benchtop (on ice) for five minutes where they thawed out. I tried blaming the croscopic effect, but the calculation shows that without the depression of freezing point, the stock would have thawed out at 0 C, as such, it did at -4 C. And they should have not thawed out more than, say -70 C.

95% personal stupidity
5% being trolled by the cryoscopic effect.

Awesome women, chapter 1: Hedy Lamarr

This should become a recurring post.. about the most awesome wimmen who have ever lived. Yeah, the list is long and will have everyone from Enid Blyton to Rani Laxmibai to Marie Curie. But lets start off with Hedy Lamarr, possibly the only person ever to be described as a scientist-actress. Hedy was an actress who was not afraid to take up risque roles, very daring for someone of her Jewish Austro-Hungarian lineage. And then she co-invented the first form of frequency hopping, which was intended for homing torpedos, and is today seen in in most forms of radar guided interceptors. Pretty awesome, nein? Here, look at some pictures of her.

Me back

The last two weeks have been very exciting. Two weeks ago, I was at Keystone, Colorado, presenting our lab's research (on behalf of my boss, I should add, who was at a conference in Croatia). Presenting the whole lab's work, and not just my own was rather terrifying. It was very exciting to see that our work was very well received. Keystone itself is a wunnerful place to visit, with beautiful vistas and great hiking. After the morning of the talk, we (I was fortunate enough to become friends with a great group of peers) we drove up to the continental divide, which was at 11990 feet, and then legged it up to the nearest summit. That was lung-bustingly painful, but awesome. Then we drove back, at which point someone pointed out that I should have a poster. I was totally unaware that short talk presenters were also supposed to have posters. Who knew? Anyway, I slammed together something with a giant Post-it and a few marker pens. Which turned out to be quite a hit. The next day was even awesome-er, with more hiking. The conference ended with a party at which there was some dancing and cartwheeling. Yeah...

Quantum LolCat

Back from Colorado

The conference was awesome. I had the opportunity to interact with some really great researchers, especially with this comp-bio group out of Pittsburgh. We (our lab's work) was very well received, and I got a lot of great personal feedback. The high point of the meeting though was making friends with a bunch of great people who will probably be members of the scientific cognoscenti (read: people who will review my future papers, [massive dose of optimism in that there will be some future papers]). Yeah, great time.

I was especially excited to see that progress in coarse grained modeling and elastic network studies on fairly large proteins. And this one talk on GroEL by Horovitz which blew me away with the coolest FRET experiment I have ever heard described.

Oh shite! Aka biogas.

Crap is a great source of energy, if only we can get it out in a useful fashion. So, this article appeared recently which lists many measures in the US. Good reading. But, hang on, if you are Desi and about as old as me (pushing 30).. then surely, you remember the old "biogas lagwao re bhaiya.. biogas lagwao" viddys on Doordarshan..? Hmm, a quick search revealed this page. Yeah, I have some time on my hands right now to be thinking about random shite.

Open question: should genes be patented?

Read this CNN article and then decide.

DNA

Turns out that the DNA used for coding the protein I am working with is damaged. We made a single residue mutation, which seems to have worked, as per the sequencer. However, there are several other insertions and deletions. These lead to frameshift mutations, among other things. That might explain our recent misery in getting the protein to behave.Well, back to the lab again....

What is a PhD worth today?

This is a question I ask myself every so often. Good answers are not forthcoming. Let us take a short look at the context of this problem. In the India of today, certain jobs are highly paid: the software industry, banking/finance. One might say that the Indian economy has finally come of age. But the other side to this 'success' is that all other professions are being sidelined. To the extent that it is now increasingly difficult to the point to being impossible for, say a high school teacher to buy a flat in any major city. Forget houses, only the rich live in houses in urban India. Small businesses are being run into the ground by large conglomerates. In effect, much of our nation is being Walmart-ised. The other side of easy, but well paying jobs straight out of college is that the more 'staid' professions, such as 'proper' engineering; just does not have any takers. As a result, our industrial production is dropping in overall quality. And the diversion of trained minds to relatively well paying, but not intellectually demanding jobs (call centres, anyone) is in my opinion the equivalent of the nation shooting itself in the head. The price we will pay for adopting the worst of Western values without thought is that we risk becoming a client state for the powers that be. But coming to the initial topic, what is a PhD worth? State salaries are not too high for research staff. Industrial research is a new beast in India. But in the larger context discussed above, these two articles talk about miscalculations by policymakers and the larger malaise gripping the entire university system, although from the US perspective. Good reading.

1. Don't Become a Scientist!
2. Doc'd - economic disadvantages of graduate education

Is global warming now irreversible?

Read this article.

Female orgasms directly correlated to partner's bank balance?

Apparently... read on. Hmmm... I guess that explains how the world functions.

Meteor lights up Canadian skies...

Look at this viddy!

Space: the final frontier... eh?

Three years after Bush canceled the space shuttle programme, read this article about the now defunct former Soviet shuttle programme Buran.

Chandrayaan: Update

So, it got to the moon.. Awesome!

Ultima Thule

Read here, stuff beyond the Universe!

CERN's magnets also quench!

A magnet quench, I mean a superconducting magnet quench (we do not give a shite about that silly room temp. stuff) is an avalanche process which starts with the superconducting coil jumping its critical temperature. At which it becomes resistive. Hence dissipating heat. Hence heating its liquid helium sheath. Hence becoming more resistive. Hence heating further. This is an avalanche process which culminates in the coil reaching room temperature and the helium boiling off. NMR rooms usually have helium vent lines in case of such quenches. Otherwise any occupants in the room would probably asphyxiate. This is a cool viddy of such a quench under controlled conditions. Magnets can be recovered after a quench, but it is a time consuming and expensive process (especially in the liquid helium it takes to cool the coils down again). Apparently this has happened at CERN. And they have hundreds of such magnets!

Peeling tape emits X-rays!

Read about it here.

Update on Chandrayaan

So my father called me up late last night (while I was dividing my attention between my dinner and Donnie Brasco on the telly) to say that Baba Ramdev had been telling people about the awesomeness coming out of Sriharikota. So he managed to switch his telly on in time to see the launch live. Something to remember for generations with pride. Chandrayaan has made it successfully to parking orbit, with an apapsis/perapsis of 23000/250 km. That is a highly elliptical orbit. Successive engine burns will extend the orbit to lunar transfer and then the fun really begins. This project is a collaboration between many countries with a mixed science payload. The report on the launch is here. The ISRO rocks.

Chandrayaan: Desi hardware going to the effing moon!!

Yeah, its here and its official. After decades of launching INSAT communication satellites and the occasional Israeli spysat, ISRO has finally decided to pop the big one. In a few short hours, Chandrayaan (literally means 'vehicle to the moon') will lift off from Sriharikota. The Chandrayaan rides atop a specially outfitted PSLV with mixed solid/liquid fuel stages, delivering a final payload of 1.3 tonnes into lunar orbit. The project carries a mix of remote sensing gadgetry with significant contributions from the ESA, and has a projected lifetime of 2 years. This is the most significant effort by the ISRO ever. Chandrayaan will ride to the heavens on a towering pillar of flame. I cannot help thinking that this is a fitting tribute to the genius of Vikram Sarabhai and Satish Dhawan.

LHC particle physics rap...

Yeah, this is an awesome rap song which apparently walked out of CERN and has been wandering around the Net.. shite it gave me a review of my particle physics class in 4ish minutes!!

Links to mp3, lyrics and more awesome shite is here.