NCBS announces its 4th annual science journalism workshop, which will be held on campus from July 23 to August 7, 2014.

Three Grade 12 students from the Central School for Tibetans at Mundgod in Karnataka are currently interning at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS). Following an agreement with their school and the NCBS, Tenzin Tsetan, Tenzin Phentok and Tenzin Zomkey began their internship on 6^th May with Professors Uma Ramakrishnan, Vatsala Thirumalai and Axel Brockmann.

Aristotle's maxim holds especially true when it comes to scientific research - where the diversity of disciplines adds so much more to forge the gigantic whole. And collaborations are key to the multi-disciplinary approaches that have fostered many contemporary science successes today. Now, after nearly ten years of ongoing collaborations between NCBS and the RIKEN Kobe Institute in Japan, the Bangalore Bio-Cluster comprising NCBS, inStem and C-CAMP has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with RIKEN Japan. The MoU will strengthen ongoing collaborations, now extending to all RIKEN institutes across Japan, promote graduate and post-doctoral exchange programs between the organizations involved and potentially also set up a new research center in the premises of the Bangalore Bio-Cluster.

With a melange of art, science and hacking, HackteriaLab 2013 is beginning today at NCBS. No, not the kind of computer hacking that comes first to our minds when we hear that word.

With the Annual Talks finishing two days back, I sent out an email to our student, junior research felllow and postdoc mailing lists asking for comments. I have compiled the responses to date, while things are still fresh in our memory. One question focused on the new conference-style format: instead of every PI giving a talk, about half the faculty did, and there were also outside speakers. Please use the comment section below this article to add any further thoughts! All photos are by me, and are from the final day's poster session.

What were you favourite talks?

* I found Benny Shilo's talk good mainly because I could relate it to my research work. I also found Nicolas' talk and work very interesting though I don't do anything related.

* Favourite talks: Nicolas Gompel (really interesting work), Jayant (introduced comments which made his talk lively), Krushnamegh (hearing him for the first time) and Pedro (very different work and model system, also highly organized presentation) in that order.

One of the most prestigious awards in science, the 2012 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, was announced yesterday, and all three recipients - Jim Spudich, Ron Vale and Michael Sheetz - have strong links to NCBS, and India generally.

Jim Spudich, from Stanford, has had a long association with NCBS and is currently adjunct faculty here. Like Vale and Sheetz, Spudich's work has focused on 'molecular motors' - intracellular molecules that can harvest chemical energy to generate force. Spudich's group has been at the forefront of discovering how the motors that power muscle and other intracellular movements -myosins- do their jobs. In particular, his laboratory has developed in vitro assays that measure the speed and force produced by myosins -and are exemplars of experimental elegance. The assays allow researchers to determine the movements and forces produced by single myosin molecules. At inStem, Spudich is now leading a team investigating the role of myosin and other proteins in inherited cardiomyopathies, visiting inStem/NCBS three to four times per year.

NCBS microscopists are invited to submit several of your images and/or digital video clips to the 2012 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition. As indicated by its title, the compettion will honour extraordinary microscope images of life science subjects. Up to five images, videos or image sequences can be entered per person, and you do not have to be a user of Olympus equipment to join in the fun. Entries for the contest can be uploaded through a web browser directly to the Olympus servers at the following URL:

http://www.olympusbioscapes.com/enter.asp

You have exactly one month to hunt through your archives, or capture some dazzling new images. The deadline for new entries is Tuesday, October 2, 2012.

The winning photos of the competition are tentatively scheduled to be published in Scientific American and the photographers will receive substantial material rewards. First prize will be Olympus microscope or camera equipment valued at $5,000. Nine additional winners will also receive valuable prizes from Olympus.  Winners will be notified in late October, and publicly announced in December, 2012.

The Science Journalism Course is back at NCBS, now accepting applications for its 2012 batch. But what was it like to be part of the first course held in 2011? What are its alumni doing now? That's something this year's prospective participants will be curious to know.