I must admit I have often doubted whether humans are psychologically equipped to take on challenges like overpopulation and global warming. These problems require cooperation on a grand scale, something that our evolutionary history, most of it spent living in tribes, might not have prepared us for. But I was heartened to find that this bleak outlook is out of sync with recent findings of Indian biologists, including some from NCBS, who have examined the nature and genetic basis of social adaptivity in some of our primate cousins, most particularly the Bonnet Macaques of southern India. Their results, including a paper just published in Behavior Genetics (see Abstract here), also made me aware of an idea that is now gaining momentum in human psychology: that as a species we possess more psychological flexibility than previously thought, and that many of our apparent weaknesses are actually indicators of our species’ remarkable capacity to cope with change. Maybe we are not as narrowly hardwired as many of us have believed.

Can you remember running down a set of stairs really fast without thinking - and then wondering in amazement, “How did I do that?”. Well in a way “you” didn’t. Just as your breathing and heartbeat do not require your conscious input, the control of other rhythmic activities such as walking and running is largely automatic. This can free up your often already-overloaded conscious mind to think about more important things, for example where to run to! In any animal, the automatic component of each rhythmic motion is enabled by a specialised part of the central nervous system that functions as a “Central Pattern Generator” (CPG) for that particular motion. CPGs are a fascinating and important area of animal biology, and last year Gayatri Venkiteswaran and Gaiti Hasan of NCBS published a paper in PNAS that demonstrated a previously unrecognised feature of the nerves that directly influence the CPG that controls flight in the fruitfly, Drosophila. And, right now, the movie that illustrates the most significant findings of their study is a finalist in the competition for Drosophila Image Award of 2010, an honour awarded each year by the Genetics Society of America.

“It was a warm day with early morning temperature around –16º C.” With such unaffected understatement so begins a description on Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi's blog of "a day at work in the Trans-Himalaya”, detailing some of the field work of a project reported last year in Oecologica, and which was done in an M.Sc Program that NCBS runs in collaboration with the Wildlife Conservation Society-India and the Centre for Wildlife Studies.

The first dual student between the Université de la Réunion and Manipal University-NCBS, Mr. Chilamakuri Chandra Sekhar Reddy, recently defended his Ph.D. thesis. A student of Prof. R. Sowdhamini at NCBS (part of TIFR), his success follows from a three-way MOU established in 2005 between NCBS, Manipal University (Manipal, India) and a French university, Université de la Réunion (Réunion Island, France). This MOU was set up to facilitate collaborative research in the emerging areas of computational biology. It was designed  to allow for dual studentship, and involves an enhanced twinning programme, including student visits and a Ph.D. degree awarded from the two universities.

There is probably no single topic of research that straddles as many NCBS teams as olfaction. Despite seeming the most mysterious of our senses, the sense of smell is actually the simplest sensory system to study, and NCBS teams try to understand it from every angle.