A group of students in the MSc. Wildlife and Conservation programme in NCBS recently made a short (7-min) documentary film about a place that is host to a unique but fast disappearing population of birds. It is 50 km from Bangalore, yet hardly any of us know about the dangers faced by its wildlife. This is the story of how and why the documentary was made and what the students learned from the experience. (Watch the documentary, Awaiting Death on YouTube here.)

Science seems to attract a naturally cautious breed. When you actually start doing research, however, you soon realise that an entirely new level of cautiousness is called for. The perils of "confirmation bias", Murphy’s Law, and the sheer technological complexity of even a routine experiment can quickly humble the researcher and drive home the value of taking every aspect of a project very, very seriously. Nature does not yield her secrets easily.

This week on February 15 and 16 NCBS will host a meeting, “Learning about memory: cells, circuits and behaviour”, that brings together the world’s leading researchers on the neurobiological basis of memory. The six speakers, each of whom will give one talk each day, span the field, not only in terms of its scope – from molecular mechanisms right up to network dynamics – but also its entire history.

Tim Bliss, the first speaker, was the co-author, with Terje Lømo, of the 1973 paper that gave the initial detailed account of “long-term potentiation” (LTP) a phenomenom that provided, for the first time, evidence of a possible cellular foundation for memory. LTP describes a form of enhanced and enduring connectivity between neurons that develops if there is frequent electrochemical crosstalk across their junction (the synapse). Thus repeated experiences have a greater possibility of leaving a neural trace in our brains, and so, for better or worse, we are at least partly the products of our own individual history.

Starting Saturday, January 23 the third Molecular Motors, Tracks and Transport (M2T2) international workshop will run for six days in Pondicherry, India.

In mechanical devices, directed movement typically depends upon some type of motor. Living systems also have their motors, used to drive the organism as a whole, or parts of its body or even the movement of structures within the cell itself. Intracellular movements depend upon molecular motors that use sophisticated intramolecular amplification mechanisms to take nanometre steps along protein tracks laid out in linear fashion in the cytoplasm.

Bioinformatics is the application of data mining techniques to detect patterns in molecular biological information. The basic information can be of many types, e.g. DNA sequence data, the amino acid composition of proteins, and the levels of gene and protein expression in the cell. Since this data is now being collected in vast quantities, often using automated techniques, one of the main challenges of bioinformatics is to develop ever-more powerful computational tools.