On Sunday, Jan 20 I joined a couple of friends from inStem and NCBS to play as Team NCBS in the football tournament of the Indo-German Chamber of Commerce at the SPT sports academy. Mr. Loeffler from the German Consulate had told me about the tournament. NCBS supplied the vehicle to get there.

The picturesque pond at NCBS was originally a low lying area close to the students' hostel Parijatha. It formed the south western part of the space allotted to NCBS by GKVK. NCBS moved to its present campus from the premises of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in 1998-99. By then, the Academic Research building (now named the Eastern Laboratories), the Housing and Hostel buildings, the Sub-Station and Chiller plant as well as the Stores building (which was the first building to be constructed at NCBS and used as its site office) were constructed. Subsequently, the stores moved to its present location in the year 2002-03, making way for housing the computational services.

T.M. Sahadevan, Head of Development Activities at NCBS retires from NCBS on July 6, 2012. Read on for a stream of sub-consciousness about his career.

The Nikon Small World Competition 2012 is now open and invites participants to upload photographs online. Videos pertaining to the theme "Small World in Motion" are also invited for the Small World in Motion Competition 2012. The deadline for both competitions closes on 30th April 2012.

Talks during the 2-day program, "Genes to Olfaction: 60 years in Science" beginning on 2nd January 2012 will be videostreamed in real time on the NCBS website. These videos can be viewed by both internal (NCBS) and external users. The detailed schedule of the program - speakers, topics and times - is available here.

Striking that perfect balance between work and managing a family is never easy. And being a scientist does not make things any easier. Feeding a fussy infant with experiments tugging at your brain, dropping your children to school as a grant deadline looms in the afternoon: juggling all these requires tremendous skill and exceptional time management. That's when child care facilities are a godsend.

Child care centres play a big role in helping parents handle their careers. Knowing that this can boost an economy, many countries like Australia and Norway offer subsidized child care facilities to their citizens. In India, a day care facility is mandatory in government institutes. NCBS too has its own child care facility - but it's something that people here know very little about. I decided to find out more about it: how it works, what it involves and the people who make it happen.

Yesterday two new videos were uploaded and if you watch them you will see we are more than happy to host light-hearted, and technically unsophisticated, productions. It's YouTube after all!

"Wow, that's art." That's something you're bound to have thought sometime, looking down a microscope.You might be right - be it the multi-faceted eyes of a Drosophila staring back at you through the lens or that amazing sight of nerve cells firing in a rat's brain that got you hooked on neuroscience for life. Whatever it was that took your breath away, it's time to share all those stunning digital microscopy images or videos that you may have stashed away - and win amazing prizes.