The Bohred Biologist

Progress in science is often very slow. Ask a graduate student and you would hear about the countless hours that were spent in trying to come up with a hypothesis, planning the experiments, testing the hypothesis, only to come up with results that were totally different from what was expected to be observed in the beginning. At times these results lead to roadblocks which have been to sidestepped to make progress; sometimes the results lead to dead ends, which is every scientist's nightmare and just a few times they point in the direction of new science, which is exciting. Most scientists understand that this is the nature of work when exploring the boundary between what is already known, the collective human knowledge, and the vast sea of unknowns that is waiting to be unraveled. Rarely, things work exactly as expected; no hiccups, no glitches and joy that you get as a result is really hard to explain. When everything works as expected and you discover somethin...

It is not everyday that we get to hear that a new planet may have been discovered within our solar system. Apart from the planets that are the visible to the naked eye, only two other planets have ever been discovered; both these discoveries were made well before the beginning of the twentieth century. A new paper authored by Caltech scientists Konstanin Batygin and Michael Brown was published in The Astronomical Journal, yesterday. The authors claim that they may have discovered the ninth planet of our solar system using theoretical simulations. They base their hypothesis on the motion of family of trans-Neptunian objects at the outer edge of our solar system which move in odd orbits around the sun. The authors explain this peculiar behavior by theorizing that a new planet, currently called Planet Nine, might be nudging these trans-Neptunian objects into their odd orbits. If this planet exists then it must have an orbital period of 15,000 years and is seven times f...

Last week was the Nobel prize announcement week, when the prize winners in the three science fields, along with the literature and peace prize winners were announced. It is the time of the year when science news takes center stage, apart from the times when NASA discovers running water on Mars or the LHC discovers the Higgs boson. Ahead of the prize announcements, each year, a number of articles about the Nobel prize are written all over the internet and many of them talk about unusual Nobel prize facts . But the best source for Nobel prize facts is either the official twitter feed of the Nobel prize  for facts all around the year or the facts page on their website . You can find some of the commonly known facts about the science prizes, like, 583 Nobel prizes have been awarded in the three science fields 17 women (18 prizes; Marie Curie won twice) have won the Nobel prize in the science fields Marie Curie, John Bardeen and Frederick San...

As the title of this post indicates, this is the fifth post in the series of posts where I share astronomy pictures clicked through my telescope. This is my favorite kind of post to write because I am the content creator and it satisfying to share with the world what you have created (in this case, I am only clicking a photograph :-) ). Also, these posts are much easier to write as I don't have to spend a lot of time researching the topic. In spite of such advantages, lately, I haven't had the opportunity to click any new photos of the wonderful universe around us. But in this post, I will be sharing a few pictures from the past that I hadn't shared in the blog.

This is a wonderful talk by Sean Carroll at The Amazing Meeting (TAM) 2012 on the topic of how to think about the Universe, going from the fundamental laws of physics to macroscopic objects in the universe like us, humans. Though a short talk, he covers a wide variety of topics ranging from Quantum Field Theory to morality. The talk is witty, succinct and it makes you wonder about the world around us.

For sometime now, I have been wanting to write this post about science channels on YouTube. Online science videos, especially on YouTube, have come a long way in the last eighteen months and have become wonderful sources for obtaining information about science. Most of these videos are under ten minutes long and it gives an opportunity for the viewers to learn about almost any topic in science in a really short amount of time. MinutePhysics is one of the most famous science channels on YouTube and in this post I will be mentioning some of the other YouTube channels that I have been following. This list isn't exhaustive so if there are other channels, feel free to add them to the comments for the benefit of others.

If you are familiar with Einstein's special theory of relativity, your answer would immediately be that the mass of the body approaches infinity as you get closer to the speed of light. Though this answer comes directly from the following famous equation derived by Einstein to prove the equivalence of mass and energy, E=mc^2 it is not very intuitive. Last evening, thanks to MinutePhysics , I learnt a much more fun and intuitive answer to this question.