VS Ramachandran: How Neurons Shaped Civilizations

Surprising Science of Motivation

Stem cell research in India too?

This is good news… I guess!

Bangalore: Cryo-Save Group, an adult stem cell banking company, launched Cryo-Save India in Bangalore on Wednesday. The subsidiary in

India has an automated stem cell banking facility and offers a dual storage system. The facility will enable automatic processing to avoid manual intervention and contamination. It will collect and store adult stem cells derived from cord blood.

The facility can store 1,50,000 samples. According to MD of Cryo-Save India, V R Chandramouli, India has a good market for advanced stem cell banking services. "There is an immense market potential for adult stem cell or family banking here," he confirmed.

The facility was set up with an investment of 1.8 million euros. Cryo-Save Group will scale up its investment to 2 million euros after a year, depending on the response in India.
"Stem cells are natural repair kits of the human body

In the last 18 years, more than 10,000 patients have been treated with cord blood stem cell transplantations in over 150 countries," Chandramouli said. "Currently, stem cell research is being done for more than 85 diseases."
Cryo-Save’s services are available in 37 countries.

[ source: TOI ]

The ‘Naked Women’ effect

Hmm…. No comments…

Naked women make men blind to high prices

Brussels: Advertisers have known this all along, but now it is scientifically proven: men who are exposed to naked women stop paying attention to prices.

According to a report Tuesday by Flemish broadcaster VRT, a study by the University of Leuven found an inverse relationship between testosterone levels and price awareness among males.

 

The “naked women” effect is particularly strong among machos, the study found.

 

“Machos usually tend to be tough negotiators, but advertisements featuring naked women turn them into gullible sheep,” said Siegfried Dewitte, a professor of economics who carried out the study.

 

The study also found a similar effect on women exposed to scantily-clad men. However, it also found that women generally tend to be more sensitive to the touch, rather than to such visual stimuli.

[ Source: IBN Live ]

Your time is in your hands

So… the time is in our hands…. or rather…. your brain… This kind of explains why the world stops moving when I am tense!!!

Madagascar,India and S.America – Friendly neighbours?

To me, this just shows how stupid we are to be fighting over pieces of land that we call countries… Lands that were once together, now floated apart over millions of years. We fail to realize that this land was there even before humanity existed and will be there even after humans perish. While, we can spend our life times trying to put a fence around our piece of land and clal it ours and then fight in the name of it…. I am not saying that military capabilities are stupid. I am just saying that the need for having that is stupid.

 

‘Frog from Hell’ that ate baby dinosaurs
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
A squat beachball sized toad dubbed ‘the frog from Hell’ has been found in Madagascar, where it it once may have snacked on baby dinosaurs and other small animals. The 70 million year-old fossil frog is likened by researchers to a “slightly squashed beach-ball” and has been nicknamed Beelzebufo.

The discovery of the creature, of a kind once thought unique to South America, lends weight to a new theory that Madagascar, India and South America were once linked together into a supercontinent until late in the Age of Dinosaurs, around 65 million years ago.

The new frog esembles living Horned frogs (ceratophryines or ‘pac-man frogs’) in having a squat body, huge head and wide mouth, containing dozens of little teeth. With a body length (not counting the legs) of up to 16 inches – longer than a rugby ball – and a weight of around four kilos (10 pounds), it is more than twice the size of its largest living relatives.

The fossil has been identified by scientists from University College London and Stony Brook University, New York. Their research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests it lived alongside meat-eating dinosaurs, plant-eating crocodiles and giant snakes, which are all very different from the present day animals of Madagascar.

Prof Susan Evans, who studied Beezebufo with Dr Marc Jones at UCL says: “This frog, a relative of today’s Horned frogs, would have been the size of a slightly squashed beach-ball, with short legs and a big mouth. If it shared the aggressive temperament and ‘sit-and-wait’ ambush tactics of living Horned toads, it would have been a formidable predator on small animals.

Its diet would most likely haveconsisted of insects and small vertebrates like lizards, but it’s not impossible that Beelzebufo might even have munched on hatchling orjuvenile dinosaurs.” The history of Madagascar’s unusual frogs has generated intense debate, fuelled by the near absence of a fossil record.

“Our discovery of a frog strikingly different from today’s Madagascan frogs, and akin to the Horned frogs previously considered endemic to South America, lends weight to the controversial idea that Madagascar, the Indian subcontinent and South America were linked well into the Late Cretaceous.

“It also suggests that the initial spread of such beasts began earlier than that proposed by recent estimates,” says Prof Evans. Earlier work has found similarities between the dinosaurs of these three regions, along with mammals, birds and crocodiles.