"Grrrrrrrrrr," says a chorus of young voices, followed by a burst of laughter. On the screen is a smiling man cheerily reading out a story about a lonely bear who loses his growl and finds it again. The children are from the on-campus crèche Dolna, and the man on the screen is Rob Biddulph, an award-winning children's story book writer from the UK.

 

NCBS announces the 4^th NCBS-Simons Annual Monsoon School.

Biology is essentially an interdisciplinary field and is in the forefront of modern physics and information sciences. The goal of the Monsoon School is two-fold.

NCBS welcomes Thomas van Zanten, recipient of the prestigious EMBO Long-term Fellowship for postdoctoral research. Thomas joins NCBS after training at ICFO-The Institute of Photonic Sciences, Barcelona. He got his Master's from the  University of Twente, The Netherlands, in the field of Materials Science and Technology of Polymers and received his PhD from Universitat de Barcelona, Spain, in the field of Applied Physics and Optics.

Could you tell us about your journey from Chemical engineering to the work you propose to do here?

After my training as a Chemical Engineer I moved from The Netherlands and started my graduate research in Spain. At that time, an increasing amount of indirect data suggested that the cellular membrane was segregated at the nanometer scale. However, direct observation of this nanoscale organisation required the use of optical techniques having resolutions better than conventional set-ups, which are limited by diffraction.

At an international Biodesign competition, called BIOMOD, hosted by Harvard University every year, NCBS fielded a team - the DNA Maestros - in November 2012 comprising 7 students from NCBS and IIT-Guwahati. Their project was a great success, winning a Silver Medal. At the competition they received tremendous feedback on the quality of their presentation from several other team mentors. Following NCBS's invitation for a repeat performance here, the DNA Maestros will regale you on Friday 21.12.12 (to make sure your world DOES in fact end with their presentation!) for about 15-20 minutes with their prize winning entry.

It's on at 4 pm, in Safeda. The world ends at ~4.20 pm - come and attend your last scientific talk!!! The speakers are a bunch of young undergraduates, do encourage them with your presence and toughen them with your best questions. See you there at 4 pm on Friday.

In March this year the Indian news media reported the onfield death, by cardiac arrest, of 28-year-old Bangalore footballer D. Venkatesh. Many young athletes die like this every year - recent victims have included stars of the European soccer scene and American basketball. In most cases, these deaths are due to an inherited form of the disease, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Basically, the heart muscle gets too big for its own good. Its muscular walls lose the flexibility needed for normal pumping, and when the demand for blood flow jumps too high - most commonly while exercising - the hypertrophic heart cannot keep up. And the problem is not limited to athletes. It can also strike the more sedentary among us.

Scientists at NCBS and inStem, Bangalore, are trying to understand the underlying biology of inherited cardiac hypertrophy (HCM), and also the converse disease, in which the heart muscles thin out (dilated cardiomyopathy, DCM). In each disease, the most common genetic cause is a mutation in one of the proteins that comprise the cellular machinery for muscle contraction (see figure). The net outcome of any individual mutation - either a hyper- or hypo-trophic heart - depends on whether muscle contraction is increased or decreased by the change in the mutated protein. But how that increase or decrease in efficiency is brought about remains unclear.

The world's largest population of the endangered Asian elephant Elephas maximus occurs in one of the world's most densely populated and poorest regions, India. The ever-increasing human population exerts tremendous pressure on the natural resources including the forests in which these giants live. Increasingly, the competition for land and food has driven the two mega-vegetarians into conflict. Human-elephant conflict (HEC) is fast emerging as the greatest threat to the conservation of our 'National Heritage Animal' in the 21^st century, far greater than poaching.

Although the elephant is one of the most well known, loved and revered animals in this country, we are still grappling to address many an important issue related to its conservation, including HEC. We lack rigorous scientific studies into the behaviour of these highly social animals, and thus we are unable how to predict how they might engage with their habitat - and with us. Do they always just 'follow the herd' - or do these long-lived, intelligent animals make individual decisions? Knowing the answers to these questions is fundamental to informed management.