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.

Coriolis force is a force experienced by objects moving on the surface of the earth in a direction that is not along the direction of Earth's rotation. Since the earth rotates from west to east, any object that is not moving in this direction, will experience the Coriolis force. This force has been observed to affect large cyclonic storms and causes them to rotate clockwise in the southern hemisphere and counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere. Tropical storm Leslie off the coast of North America captured by NASA on August 30th 2012. Courtesy: Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center Though this is a real, observable scientific effect, there is a widespread myth associated with it. In this post I am going to tackle this myth head on.

As it has been quite sometime since I posted an article, I thought the best way to restart would be to write the next part of the most popular series of articles in my blog "The Universe through my telescope" (yup! that's what the stats say). And what better photo to post than that of the majestic planet, Saturn.

A friend recently recently asked me this intriguing question - what keeps the earth spinning in space? Though it sounds like a simple question, the answer depends on our understanding of a complex process like the formation of the solar system. But the simple answer to this question is angular momentum and inertia. Let's see how the earth's rotation depends on these two terms from classical physics.

Good news for Einstein's fans and bad news for people who always want to prove Einstein wrong - CERN's press release earlier today confirmed that neutrinos do not travel faster than the speed of light. Though physicists always say that a new, unexpected result is always exciting, they will be relieved that such a fundamental constant like the speed of light is not broken. Else they might have had to "relearn" all of modern physics.

The transit of Venus observed by millions of people yesterday was a spectacular sight. Be it amateur astronomers or the general public, everyone was excited to watch the dark disk of Venus move across the surface of the sun. Though quite a lot of people observed the rare phenomenon, not many people were aware of the transit. It is unfortunate that people did not market this event like the other infamous event that is "scheduled" to happen later this year (read as December 21 2012 ). In this post I am going to give a few reason why you should have watched the transit of Venus yesterday.

Want to see the most beautiful photo of the Andromeda galaxy? Here it is... This is a composite image made of 11 different images that have been stitched together. The reason behind this is that Andromeda is MASSIVE!!! It is more than 250,000 light years across. That's about 2.5 times the size of our own galaxy - The Milky Way. Before I talk more about Andromeda or about this image, here is the photo...

The title of the post is definitely confusing. Why would anyone want to look at the moon and miss the beautiful and rare sight of Venus moving across the sun ( Transit of Venus )?  This is equivalent to a car racing fan admiring the beauty of a normal road car when a Formula 1 car is parked right next to it. No astronomer would want to do that, especially using a billion dollar telescope like Hubble . Then why is NASA planning to do this?

Ever wondered what protons, that are accelerated almost to the speed of light, do to the human body? Physicists try to answer the question...

When I decided to convert the mythbusters posts on my blog into a series, I immediately wanted to write a post about the Mayan apocalypse. And in 2012, it is definitely the most famous myth floating around. In fact it has become bigger than an ordinary myth simply because of the number of people who know about it also believe in it. Hollywood has successfully misrepresented it and there are thousands, if not millions, of webpages with information that support and deny the myth. There is definitely nothing new that I can write about it; hence I did not write a post. But a new archaeological dig in Guatemala opposes the myth that the Mayan long count calendar, which comes to an end on 21st December 2012, symbolizes the end of the world. So I thought I would write my first and last post on this topic which has garnered attention for no reason.

This is a really interesting TED talk by Brian Greene. I don't think I need to introduce him. He is arguably the most well-known popular science writer. He is famous for his book " The Elegant Universe " which was made into one of the most popular science documentaries on television by the same name . It was this documentary, and the book later, that introduced me to the  wonderful world of physics and I owe it to Brian for my current interest in physics.

Last night (May 5th), the sky was lit up by the "Supermoon". Many people would already be familiar with this concept as it has been in the news for over a week now. I personally wanted to click pictures of the supermoon and write a post about it. But due to bad weather, I was unable to capture any photos. Luckily, the sky was clear the night before and I had clicked a few pictures. So I have the pictures of an " almost " supermoon.

My last post in this series (yes, I plan to make this a series, provided I am able to click good pictures), The Universe through my telescope II , is one of the most popular posts on my blog. The comment section indicated that even though the images didn't have the magnification, resolution or clarity of the amazing Hubble images (the background of my blog has one such image), everyone was excited to know that one would see the craters on the moon, latitudinal cloud bands on Jupiter or the rings around Saturn with such a simple instrument.

Following the April fools' day tradition, a number of websites have been playing pranks. It is interesting to note that a number of these pranks were played by scientists, scientific organizations and science journals. So my mantra for the day is "Don't Trust Anybody" (not even the scientists) and I would suggest the same for everyone. Here are some of the interesting pranks that I came across today. Have fun! :)