Swallowed magnets attract trouble in boy's stomach

Surgeons Urge Vigilance

Four-year-old Braden Eberle was worried. “Mom, I swallowed something,” said the San Jose boy. His mother, Jill, reassured him when she learned that it was just a tiny magnet that had slipped loose from a construction-type toy. But the next day, he swallowed another.“I didn’t think anything of it at first,” said Jill Eberle, but she threw away the building set after the second incident. Braden had been holding the pieces in this mouth when the pencil eraser-sized magnets came loose and slipped down his throat. “They were so tiny, I thought they would just pass through.”

The next day, Friday, Braden began to complain of an intermittent stomachache severe enough to wake him from sleep. On Saturday morning, Eberle took her son to the emergency room—purely as a precautionary measure. “I thought it was probably the flu, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the magnets,” Eberle said.

“Braden didn’t really look that sick,” agreed Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital pediatric surgeon Sanjeev Dutta, MD, who evaluated Braden at Good Samaritan Hospital in San Jose the Saturday before Easter 2007. “But when I heard he’d swallowed two magnets at two different times, I became concerned.” X-rays revealed that the powerful rare-earth magnets had snapped together in Braden’s intestinal tract and were pinching the delicate tissue. Braden needed immediate surgery.

“Dr. Dutta was adamant,” said Eberle, who hadn’t expected such a drastic response. “He wasn’t messing around.” Within two hours, the surgery was over. Dutta used minimally invasive laparoscopic techniques to remove the magnets through just three small incisions, and Braden recovered quickly.

Dutta describes the case in a study published in the February issue of the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine as a cautionary tale for other physicians. The report urges clinical vigilance and early surgical consultation when magnets are swallowed—even if the child exhibits few symptoms of distress.

Many of the magnets in today’s toys contain neodymium, a metal with an unusually strong magnetic force.

“These rare-earth magnets are so much more powerful than the magnets we used to play with as kids,” said Dutta, who is also an assistant professor of pediatric surgery at the Stanford School of Medicine. “Kids swallow things all the time. Even one magnet can cause a problem if the child has swallowed something else made of metal.” Intestinal tissue pinned between the objects can disintegrate, causing an infection or digestive issues. In addition, the affected length of intestine can twist, cutting off the blood supply and killing that portion of the bowel.

“The fact that kids have died or gotten very sick from swallowing these magnets is a big concern to me, and a primary reason why I wanted to publish Braden’s case,” said Dutta.

“These magnet toys are ubiquitous. They’re recommended for older children, but many of these kids have younger siblings.” Braden had been playing with his older brother’s set.

Older children may also be at risk. Less than two weeks after Braden’s surgery, the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued an update to an earlier warning about toys containing magnets like those Braden swallowed. At that time, one death and 27 intestinal injuries like Braden’s had been reported due to such magnets. At least 10 of those injuries involved children between the ages of 6 and 11.

Several magnet-based construction sets have been recalled by the commission. In many, the tiny, powerful magnets are affixed to plastic building pieces such as 1.5-inch squares, 1-inch triangles, cylinder rods, flexors, connectors, x-tenders and curves. The sets come in an assortment of colors. Other types of toys and games with the magnets have been subjected to similar recalls during the past year.

“I can’t believe they use these magnets in children’s toys,” said Eberle, who has banned all such magnets from her house. That is, all but two—the two Dutta removed from Braden’s intestine. Those she keeps as a reminder of what could have happened.

“The fact that Braden knew to tell me he had swallowed something may have saved his life,” she said. “I never would have known. I would have assumed it was the flu. It’s so scary how it happens so fast.”

Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?-SciAm debate

The following is an interesting article that is opened for comments by Scientific American:
The debate is about whether wikis, blogs and other collaborative web technologies could usher in a new era of science. Or not.

The explosively growing World Wide Web has rapidly transformed retailing, publishing, personal communication and much more. Innovations such as e-commerce, blogging, downloading and open-source software have forced old-line institutions to adopt whole new ways of thinking, working and doing business.
Science could be next. A small but growing number of researchers--and not just the younger ones--have begun to carry out their work via the wide-open blogs, wikis and social networks of Web 2.0. And although their efforts are still too scattered to be called a movement--yet--their experiences to date suggest that this kind of Web-based "Science 2.0" is not only more collegial than the traditional variety, but considerably more productive.
"Science happens not just because of people doing experiments, but because they're discussing those experiments," explains Christopher Surridge, editor of the Web-based journal, Public Library of Science On-Line Edition (PLoS ONE). Critiquing, suggesting, sharing ideas and data--communication is the heart of science, the most powerful tool ever invented for correcting mistakes, building on colleagues' work and creating new knowledge. And not just communication in peer-reviewed papers; as important as those papers are, says Surridge, who publishes a lot of them, "they're effectively just snapshots of what the authors have done and thought at this moment in time. They are not collaborative beyond that, except for rudimentary mechanisms such as citations and letters to the editor."
The technologies of Web 2.0 open up a much richer dialog, says Bill Hooker, a postdoctoral cancer researcher at the Shriners Hospital for Children in Portland, Ore., and the author of a three-part survey of open-science efforts in the group blog, 3 Quarks Daily. "To me, opening up my lab notebook means giving people a window into what I'm doing every day. That's an immense leap forward in clarity. In a paper, I can see what you've done. But I don't know how many things you tried that didn’t work. It's those little details that become clear with open notebook, but are obscured by every other communication mechanism we have. It makes science more efficient." That jump in efficiency, in turn, could have huge payoffs for society, in everything from faster drug development to greater national competitiveness.
Of course, many scientists remain highly skeptical of such openness--especially in the hyper-competitive biomedical fields, where patents, promotion and tenure can hinge on being the first to publish a new discovery. From that perspective, Science 2.0 seems dangerous: using blogs and social networks for your serious work feels like an open invitation to have your online lab notebooks vandalized--or worse, have your best ideas stolen and published by a rival.
To Science 2.0 advocates, however, that atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust is an ally. "When you do your work online, out in the open,” Hooker says, “you quickly find that you're not competing with other scientists anymore, but cooperating with them."

Rousing Success
In principle, says PLoS ONE's Surridge, scientists should find the transition to Web 2.0 perfectly natural. After all, since the time of Galileo and Newton, scientists have built up their knowledge about the world by "crowd-sourcing" the contributions of many researchers and then refining that knowledge through open debate. "Web 2.0 fits so perfectly with the way science works, it's not whether the transition will happen but how fast," he says.
The OpenWetWare project at MIT is an early success. Launched in the spring of 2005 by graduate students working for MIT biological engineers Drew Endy and Thomas Knight, who collaborate on synthetic biology, the project was originally seen as just a better way to keep the two labs' Web sites up to date. OpenWetWare is a wiki--a collaborative Web site that can be edited by anyone who has access to it; it even uses the same software that underlies the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Students happily started posting pages introducing themselves and their research, without having to wait for a Webmaster to do it for them.
But then, users discovered that the wiki was also a convenient place to post what they were learning about lab techniques: manipulating and analyzing DNA, getting cell cultures to grow. “A lot of the 'how-to' gets passed around as lore in biology labs, and never makes it into the protocol manuals," says Jason Kelly, a graduate student of Endy's who now sits on the OpenWetWare steering committee. "But we didn't have that." Most of the students came from a background in engineering; theirs was a young lab with almost no mentors. So whenever a student or postdoc managed to stumble through a new protocol, he or she would write it all down on a wiki page before the lessons were forgotten. Others would then add whatever new tricks they had learned. This was not altruism, notes steering-committee member Reshma Shetty. "The information was actually useful to me." But by helping herself, she adds, "that information also became available around the world."
Indeed, Kelly points out, "Most of our new users came to us because they'd been searching Google for information on a protocol, found it posted on our site, and said 'Hey!' As more and more labs got on, it became pretty apparent that there were lots of other interesting things they could do."
Classes, for example. Instead of making do with a static Web page posted by a professor, users began to create dynamically evolving class sites where they could post lab results, ask questions, discuss the answers and even write collaborative essays. "And all stayed on the site, where it made the class better for next year," says Shetty, who has created an OpenWetWare template for creating such class sites.
Laboratory management benefited too. "I didn't even know what a wiki was," recalls Maureen Hoatlin of the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, where she runs a lab studying the genetic disorder Fanconi anemia. But she did know that the frenetic pace of research in her field was making it harder to keep up with what her own team members were doing, much less Fanconi researchers elsewhere. "I was looking for a tool that would help me organize all that information," Hoatlin says. "I wanted it to be Web-based, because I travel a lot and needed to access it from wherever I was. And I wanted something my collaborators and group members could add to dynamically, so that whatever I saw on that Web page would be the most recently updated version."
OpenWetWare, which Hoatlin saw in the spring of 2006, fit the bill perfectly. "The transparency turned out to be very powerful," she says. "I came to love the interaction, the fact that people in other labs could comment on what we do and vice versa. When I see how fast that is, and its power to move science forward--there is nothing like it."
Numerous others now work through OpenWetWare to coordinate research. SyntheticBiology.org, one of the site's most active interest groups, currently comprises six laboratories in three states, and includes postings about jobs, meetings, discussions of ethics, and much more.
In short, OpenWetWare has quickly grown into a social network catering to a wide cross-section of biologists and biological engineers. It currently encompasses laboratories on five continents, dozens of courses and interest groups, and hundreds of protocol discussions--more than 6100 Web pages edited by 3,000 registered users. A May 2007 grant from the National Science Foundation launched the OpenWetWare team on a five-year effort to transform OpenWetWare to a self-sustaining community independent of its current base at MIT. The grant will also support development of many new practical tools, such as ways to interface biological databases with the wiki, as well as creation of a generic version of OpenWetWare that can be used by other research communities such as neuroscience, as well as by individual investigators.

Skepticism Persists
For all the participants' enthusiasm, however, this wide-open approach to science still faces intense skepticism. Even Hoatlin found the openness unnerving at first. "Now I'm converted to open wikis for everything possible," she says. "But when I originally joined I wanted to keep everything private"--not least to keep her lab pages from getting trashed by some random hacker. She did not relax until she began to understand the system's built-in safeguards.
First and foremost, says MIT's Kelly, "you can't hide behind anonymity." By default, OpenWetWare pages are visible to anyone (although researchers have the option to make pages private.) But unlike the oft-defaced Wikipedia, the system will let users make changes only after they have registered and established that they belong to a legitimate research organization. "We've never yet had a case of vandalism," Kelly says. Even if they did, the wiki automatically maintains a copy of every version of every page posted: "You could always just roll back the damage with a click of your mouse."
Unfortunately, this kind of technical safeguard does little to address a second concern: Getting scooped and losing the credit. "That's the first argument people bring to the table," says Drexel University chemist Jean-Claude Bradley, who created his independent laboratory wiki, UsefulChem, in December 2005. Even if incidents are rare in reality, Bradley says, everyone has heard a story, which is enough to keep most scientists from even discussing their unpublished work too freely, much less posting it on the Internet.
However, the Web provides better protection that the traditional journal system, Bradley maintains. Every change on a wiki gets a time-stamp, he notes, “so if someone actually did try to scoop you, it would be very easy to prove your priority--and to embarrass them. I think that's really what is going to drive open science: the fear factor. If you wait for the journals, your work won't appear for another six to nine months. But with open science, your claim to priority is out there right away."
Under Bradley's radically transparent "open notebook" approach, as he calls it, everything goes online: experimental protocols, successful outcomes, failed attempts, even discussions of papers being prepared for publication. "A simple wiki makes an almost perfect lab notebook," he declares. The time-stamps on every entry not only establish priority, but allow anyone to track the contributions of every person, even in a large collaboration.
Bradley concedes that there are sometimes legitimate reasons for researchers to think twice about being so open. If work involves patients or other human subjects, for example, privacy is obviously a concern. And if you think your work might lead to a patent, it is still not clear that the patent office will accept a wiki posting as proof of your priority. Until that is sorted out, he says, "the typical legal advice is: do not disclose your ideas before you file."
Still, Bradley says the more open scientists are, the better. When he started UsefulChem, for example, his lab was investigating the synthesis of drugs to fight diseases such as malaria. But because search engines could index what his team was doing without needing a bunch of passwords, "we suddenly found people discovering us on Google and wanting to work together. The National Cancer Institute contacted me wanting to test our compounds as anti-tumor agents. Rajarshi Guha at Indiana University offered to help us do calculations about docking--figuring out which molecules will be reactive. And there were others. So now we're not just one lab doing research, but a network of labs collaborating."

Blogophobia
Although wikis are gaining, scientists have been strikingly slow to embrace one of the most popular Web 2.0 applications: Web logging, or blogging.
"It's so antithetical to the way scientists are trained," Duke University geneticist Huntington F. Willard said at the April 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference, one of the first national gatherings devoted to this topic. The whole point of blogging is spontaneity--getting your ideas out there quickly, even at the risk of being wrong or incomplete. "But to a scientist, that's a tough jump to make," says Willard, head of Duke's Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy. "When we publish things, by and large, we've gone through a very long process of drafting a paper and getting it peer reviewed. Every word is carefully chosen, because it's going to stay there for all time. No one wants to read, 'Contrary to the result of Willard and his colleagues…’."
Still, Willard favors blogging. As a frequent author of newspaper op-ed pieces, he feels that scientists should make their voices heard in every responsible way possible. Blogging is slowly beginning to catch on; because most blogs allow outsiders to comment on the individual posts, they have proved to be a good medium for brainstorming and discussions of all kinds. Bradley's UsefulChem blog is an example. Paul Bracher's Chembark is another. "Chembark has morphed into the water cooler of chemistry," says Bracher, who is pursuing his Ph.D. in that field at Harvard University. "The conversations are: What should the research agencies be funding? What is the proper way to manage a lab? What types of behavior do you admire in a boss? But instead of having five people around a single water cooler you have hundreds of people around the world."
Of course, for many members of Bracher's primary audience--young scientists still struggling to get tenure--those discussions can look like a minefield. A fair number of the participants use pseudonyms, out of fear that a comment might offend some professor's sensibilities, hurting a student’s chances of getting a job later. Other potential participants never get involved because they feel that time spent with the online community is time not spent on cranking out that next publication. "The peer-reviewed paper is the cornerstone of jobs and promotion," says PLoS ONE's Surridge. "Scientists don't blog because they get no credit."
The credit-assignment problem is one of the biggest barriers to the widespread adoption of blogging or any other aspect of Science 2.0, agrees Timo Hannay, head of Web publishing at the Nature Publishing Group in London. (That group's parent company, Macmillan, also owns Scientific American.) Once again, however, the technology itself may help. "Nobody believes that a scientist's only contribution is from the papers he or she publishes," Hannay says. "People understand that a good scientist also gives talks at conferences, shares ideas, takes a leadership role in the community. It's just that publications were always the one thing you could measure. Now, however, as more of this informal communication goes on line, that will get easier to measure too."

Collaboration the Payoff
The acceptance of any such measure would require a big change in the culture of academic science. But for Science 2.0 advocates, the real significance of Web technologies is their potential to move researchers away from an obsessive focus on priority and publication, toward the kind of openness and community that were supposed to be the hallmark of science in the first place. "I don't see the disappearance of the formal research paper anytime soon," Surridge says. "But I do see the growth of lots more collaborative activity building up to publication." And afterwards as well: PLoS ONE not only allows users to annotate and comment on the papers it publishes online, but to rate the papers' quality on a scale of 1 to 5.
Meanwhile, Hannay has been taking the Nature group into the Web 2.0 world aggressively. "Our real mission isn't to publish journals, but to facilitate scientific communication," he says. "We've recognized that the Web can completely change the way that communication happens." Among the efforts are Nature Network, a social network designed for scientists; Connotea, a social bookmarking site patterned on the popular site del.icio.us, but optimized for the management of research references; and even an experiment in open peer review, with pre-publication manuscripts made available for public comment.
Indeed, says Bora Zivkovic, a circadian rhythm expert who writes at Blog Around the Clock, and who is the Online Community Manager for PLoS ONE, the various experiments in Science 2.0 are now proliferating so rapidly that it is almost impossible to keep track of them. "It's a Darwinian process," he says. "About 99 percent of these ideas are going to die. But some will emerge and spread."
"I wouldn't like to predict where all this is going to go," Hooker adds. "But I'd be happy to bet that we're going to like it when we get there."

Enjoy!

Study challenges glacial melt-global warming theory!

Here we are. A roller-coaster ride that climate scientists subject us to.
The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change has injected fears of a doomsday approaching us.
No sooner has the Nobel gone to the protagonists of such a theory, a study at the University of California San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography have come out with a shocker.
But that shocker may well pave the way for climate scientists to employ newer study strategies and approach the topic in a different way.
The researchers (Richard Norris, professor of paleobiology at Scripps Oceanography, and Andre Bornemann, a postdoctoral researcher at Scripps Oceanography and who continues the research at Universitat Leipzig in Germany) have found that though temperatures were much higher during the Cretaceous period (about 90 million years ago in the time of the dinosaurus) glaciers continued to be formed.
The temperatures then were found to be 35-37°C (95-98.6°F), about 10°C (18°F) warmer than today, thus creating a supergreenhouse climate.
Now this goes against the conventional thinking so far put forth and held by protagonists of the doomsday climatic changes.
What supports this research is that at least two other studies, one in Russia and other in New Jersey, found that sea level during that age actually fell by as much as about 25-40 m (82-131 feet).
The IPCC, in fact, has put out alerts saying that sea-levels would actually rise in the present age due to global warming. How then did sea levels 90 million years back fall despite the world simmering at 10°C more than present temperatures?
The new study, "Isotopic Evidence for Glaciation During the Cretaceous Supergreenhouse" is published in the January 11th issue of the journal Science.
It examined geochemical and sea level data retrieved from marine microfossils deposited on the ocean floor 91 million years ago during the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum.
They used two independent isotopic techniques and studied microfossils to gather geochemical data on the growth and eventual melting of large Cretaceous ice sheets. The researchers compared stable isotopes of oxygen molecules (d18O) in bottom-dwelling and near-surface marine microfossils, known as foraminifera, to show that changes in ocean chemistry were consistent with the growth of an ice sheet. The second method in which an ocean surface temperature record was subtracted from the stable isotope record of surface ocean microfossils yielded the same conclusion.
These independent methods provided them evidence to conclude that an ice sheet about 50-60 percent the size of the modern Antarctic ice cap existed for about 200,000 years.
Norris wonders how even the super-warm climates of the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum were not warm enough to prevent ice growth.
Then what about now?
The researchers suspect that past greenhouse climates may have aided ice growth by increasing the amount of moisture in the atmosphere and creating more winter snowfall at high elevations.
As humans continue to add large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that accelerate the heating of the atmosphere and oceans, research on Earth's past climate conditions is critical to predict what will happen as Earth's climate continues to warm.
Will this new study warrant a change in an approach of scientists in taking what happened during the Cretaceous period as an input to current studies?
Maybe, we have missed something crucial!

Indian Science 'Circus' 2008 is like a 'wide ball'

What a comic affair the 95th Indian Science Congress in Vishakhapatnam (Andhra Pradesh) has turned out to be! Nobel Laureates are treated like film stars without a word of what they said being understood, and sessions are featuring recycled presentations, in many cases straight downloads from the Net.
The 95th Indian Science Congress in Vishakhapatnam (Andhra Pradesh) potrayed what Indians are known for best -- over-excited lot of jokers, when it comes to science and technology. More of noise than anything else.
Take the sessions, for instance. Each of the sessions were nothing but idiotic normative analysis, when its should have been scientists telling people what new things are being done that are applicable as solutions to instant problems indians face in every corner of the country.
That is not to be. Sadly, the event's theme -- ''Knowledge-based society using environmentally sustainable science and technology'' -- is too broad-based for any long-lasting impact made by the five-day event on any specific area of science.
In keeping with such a chaotic event, scientists appear to be just rambling off presentations that have been made over and over again in the past. So much so, that even the much celebrated Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) scientists made a mediocre presentation on the second day when they told a motley group of delegates about the power of space technologies in solving the mess that Indian educations lies in.
No prizes for guessing what the space scientists had to say -- that satellite-based technologies are a sure-shot solution for reaching out to school drop-outs in remote villages, that the space technology could also help in increasing the number of PhDs and MTechs who are short by as much as 30,000 and 40,000 respectively, and of course in helping doctors in a remote village be connected with specialists in the respective field to operate upon hapless persons needing to go under the knife urgently.
It is a lop-sided effort.
What these technologies do not do is convince school drop-outs to return to school. How can a student determined to begin working by stopping school to earn his family some (lots!) money be convinced by space technology to attend classes that are relayed via satellite links?
Or, how are people expected to just walk into a room where space tech is bringing material to help people complete PhDs and MTechs, when in the first place those very people are voluntarily looking at more lucrative professions, not to end up as lecturers and professors with meagre incomes in comparison with what MNCs have to offer?
The Science Congress is like a ''wide ball'' bowled by an erratic bowler. A systematic tackling of the ''lack-of-interest-in-science'' issue should begin by making science teaching an interesting exercise in schools. That requires expert teachers who have the ability to hold rapt attention of the students through unique teaching methods.
Unfortunately, what is holding the rapt attention of students today is the process of making a quick buck. Nothing scientific about that.
ISRO's chairman Madhavan Nair once rightly said only those who have a passion for research would survive being in the scientific community despite the lure of attractive pay packages offered by MNCs.
But how do you find those kind of people?
I think the science congresses should first focus on this issue -- generate more people with passion for research. Only then such events would fill up with people who come with solutions, or who have already come up with solutions for the masses.
Only then would science congress mean a more interesting event attracting more youth to its folds. This in turn would be able to popularise science, which is the very objective of the Indian Science Congress Association.
Otherwise, just forget future science congresses that have the blessing of the Union Government through a Rs 1 crore grant that comes its way every year.

NASA study points at highest ice sheet melting in 2007

This is real cause for global concern.
A new NASA-supported study reports that 2007 marked an overall rise in the melting trend over the entire Greenland ice sheet and, remarkably, melting in high-altitude areas was the highest at 150 percent more than average. In fact, the amount of snow that has melted this year over Greenland could cover the surface size of the US more than twice.
Marco Tedesco, a research scientist at the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology, cooperatively managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, used satellite data to compare average snow melting from 1988-2006 with what has taken place this summer.
According to a release issued by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Tedesco found the melting index (an indicator of where melting is occurring and for how long) to be "significantly higher than average" in high altitude areas over 1.2 miles above sea level.
Melting over those areas occurred 25-30 days longer this year than the observed average in the previous 19 years.
"When snow melts at those high altitudes and then refreezes, it can absorb up to four times more energy than fresh, unthawed snow," said Tedesco. "This can affect Earth's energy budget by changing how much radiation from the sun is absorbed by the Earth versus that reflected back into the atmosphere. Refrozen snow can also alter the snow density, thickness and snow-water content." Tedesco's findings were published on Tuesday in the American Geophysical Union's Eos newspaper.
Researchers determine the melting index by multiplying how long melting took place by the area where the increased melting took place. According to Tedesco, melting in April and May of this year in high-altitude areas was very low, but in June melting jumped unexpectedly and led to the record melting index for the year.
"This record melting index in those areas came as a bit of a surprise, showing us, once again, the extreme variability and complexity of these processes," said Tedesco. His expertise in documenting melting trends produced other recent studies on increased snow melting over Greenland and the Antarctic.
The data collected by the Special Sensor Microwave Imagers on the Defense meteorological Satellite Program satellites provided Tedesco with insight into how much of an electromagnetic signal was naturally emitted by snow and ice in areas beneath the satellite overpass. The microwave instruments can detect melting above and below the snow surface. The data were processed at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, in just 24 hours after the satellite overpass, enabling Tedesco to quickly spot changes that could signal a melting trend or new record.
Tedesco's work also confirmed that the melting index this year in lower altitude areas of Greenland, though not record breaking, was higher than average by 30 percent, placing 2007 in fifth place for the highest melting index after 2005, 2002, 1998 and 2004, in that
order.

Mindset sucks Indian science

I am just back from attending the 58^th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Hyderabad. I must say there was a shocking trend that unraveled itself, opening up the very mindset of Indian scientists. It had to happen there, for all to see!

Indian space scientists were busy ranting about their achievements rather than outlaying their plans hoping to collaborate with scientists from other countries who were there as delegates.

It was almost as a rule rater than exception.

There was this session on satellite services and applications, in which all foreign scientists presented imaginative, though achievable, projects and discussed possibilities of collaboration. These presentations evoked instant responses from the audiences through bright questions that further expanded the scope of future partnerships and technologies.

Then came our Indian guy, someone named P K Jain from Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), appearing like someone with a mission in life to chatter all the achievements that ISRO has to its credit over the past 40 years.

To top it, he looks at the chairperson and says “Sir, I am sorry to rush through the presentation as you can see it is very difficult, nay almost impossible, to present what all we have achieved in the last four decades in just 15 minutes given to me for presentation.”

Wow!

One wonders whether it is an international congress meant to share and discuss future road maps or a platform to pat one’s own back over achievements in the past!

Come to think of it, it is hardly shocking. It is just an extension of the Indian mind. It is the Indian mind!

It also speaks volumes of an in-built Indian psychological complex that reflects a fear of not being acknowledged. And what better chance than an international congress where delgates from almost all space-faring nations have gathered, that too in your own home.

This fear and mounting pressures have also in the past led to a now-common feature in Indian science – plagiarism!

And how does one detect it? It is almost impossible. Thousands and thousands of papers are presented throughout the world and most are available on the net if one knows where to look for it. And you should know that Indian scientists are pretty good at that.

Why science in India suffers may not take too long for any person closely watching the “evolution of science“ in this country, if at all there is such a thing happening in India.

Forget the clichéd reasons given for the suffering of science and the scientific community – lack of infrastructure, inadequate funds, ignoring basic research due to lack of a sound foundation in school and college, dwindling scientific temper or even tendency of the youth to opt for lucrative careers rather than take up challenges posed by daily life for improving conditions of the people.

These are reasons that are easier sucked up by the mind than attack the root cause of why Indian science suffers so chronically that it has hardly got out of the bed it rests in, hoping to recover.

Looks like science would continue to suffer for eternity in India because of the very mindset of the scientists, not because of lack of assets required to boost science and technology anywhere.

Where is the direction of research? Is there dedication to help translate research into applications for people?

Former Scientific Advisor to Defence Minister of India, Prof V K Aatre, taking advantage of his presently being in retirement, mustered up enough courage to say what he would never have dared to while in service as the chief of India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). He said: “Where is research in India? Is anyone conducting research here at all? Where are the research labs? Do they exist?”

That, coming from the top man of the defence labs in India is truly something to ponder over, even if it came through his retirement, it did come nevertheless.

Now these are sirens calling out the danger signals.

Aatre also pointed out that no matter how much more funding (the S&T funding in India is a mere 0.8 per cent of the GDP) is added through government sanction, it would hardly be of help because the Indian mindset lacks the spirit of questioning that is mandatory for making good scientists.

India actually provides an ideal set-up for scientists to work on the needs of people, because India is a country where needs out-run the processes meant to meet those needs. But you may never come across heartening cases of people researching towards developing applications that could make day-to-day life more convenient for people.

In fact there are applications. But these are begotten by people from glossy malls where technology wrapped up in devices land up from other countries. Then we crib and cry, not knowing that the fault lies in our own mindset!

That also explains why we are struggling with our “prided” light combat aircraft, Tejas, programme, or even its engine, Kaveri. From the initial proud position of insisting on all-indigenous products, the defence scientists are now forced into submission to accept help from the likes of Lockheed Martin, Snecma and their brood.

The result? The indigenous element would be reduced to around 40-50 percent. Not more!

The lack of indigenous foray into scientific applications has left the field open to foreign technologies coming in and exploiting the gullible masses.

But foreign ka maal is still a much sought after thing among the rural people.

In the process they end up paying many times more than what they would have to pay for indigenised technologies and services. But where are they?

Sad, but true! Science really sucks!

Stomach, the way to you lover's heart, say male chimps

Science Daily writes:
They say that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach and the same could be said for female chimpanzees. Researchers studying wild chimps in West Africa have discovered that males pinch desirable fruits from local farms and orchards as a means of attracting female mates.
Lead researcher, Dr Kimberley Hockings from the University of Stirling's Department of Psychology said: "We believe the males may be using crop-raids as a way to advertise their prowess to other group-members, especially the opposite sex. Such daring behaviour certainly seems to be an attractive trait and possessing a sought-after food item, such as papaya, appears to draw even more positive attention from the females."

The study, which took place in the West African village of Bossou in the Republic of Guinea, is the only recorded example of regular sharing of plant foods by unrelated, non-provisioned wild chimpanzees.

Dr Hockings explained: "It is unusual behaviour as even though the major part of chimpanzees' diets consists of plant foods, wild plant food sharing (defined as an individual holding a food item but allowing another individual to consume part of that item) occurs infrequently. However, in chimpanzee communities that engage in hunting, meat is frequently used as a 'social tool' for nurturing alliances and social bonds.

This research shows that chimpanzees at Bossou use crop-raiding as an opportunity to obtain and share desirable foods, providing further insights into the evolutionary basis of human food sharing. In humans, the pursuit of certain foods is also strongly sex-biased; for example, it has been proposed that men in hunter-gatherer societies acquire large and risky-to-obtain food packages for social strategising and to garner attention."

The researchers found that adult males mainly shared the spoils of their crop-raids with females of reproductive age; particularly with a female within the group who took part in most consortships (where an adult female and an adult male chimpanzee move to the periphery of their community so that the male gains exclusive mating access).

Dr Hockings said: "The male who shared the most food with this female engaged in more consortships with her and received more grooming from her than the other males, even the alpha male. Therefore the male chimpanzees appear to be 'showing off' and trading their forbidden fruit for other currencies, i.e. 'food-for-sex and --grooming'."

The study is published in the September 12 issue of the online, open-access journal PLoS One.

The study was carried out by the following researchers: Kimberley J. Hockings (University of Stirling), Tatyana Humle (University of Wisconsin-Madison), James R. Anderson (University of Stirling), Dora Biro (University Of Oxford), Claudia Sousa (New University of Lisbon), Gaku Ohashi (Kyoto University) and Tetsuro Matsuzawa (Kyoto University).

About wild chimpanzees

Wild chimpanzees have declined by more than 66% over the last 30 years, to a mere 200,000. Although the chimpanzees of Bossou are fortunate enough to be afforded a degree of protection and tolerance by local Manon people, other chimpanzee communities throughout Africa are not so privileged. Chimpanzees and other non-human primates are threatened by an intricate web of factors including unrelenting deforestation and fragmentation, poaching, disease, and capture for the pet trade, all of which threaten their long-term survival in the wild. These are human problems, the solutions to which will benefit both people and chimpanzees.

Cultivated plant foods are shared much more frequently than wild plant foods at Bossou, even though adult male chimpanzees often appear nervous when raiding crops (rough scratching, a self-directed behavioural pattern shown in response to anxiety, was used to quantify levels of anxiety). The shared cultivated fruits are usually large and easily divisible, and adult males are most likely to share such foods obtained in exposed locations and in the presence of local people (which is also associated with increased levels of anxiety).

Citation: Hockings KJ, Humle T, Anderson JR, Biro D, Sousa C, et al (2007) Chimpanzees Share Forbidden Fruit. PLoS ONE 2(9): e886. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000886