Are we close to a breakthrough with HIV and Malaria?

Livescience reports that a Superdrug could fight both HIV and malaria. This drug does its tricks by acting as an HIV protease inhibitor -- "preventing the deadly virus from constructing its proteins correctly".

Read more here http://yhoo.it/jtMwxX

Use your senses to detect problem in your car

A must read at http://autos.yahoo.com/articles/autos_content_landing_pages/1805/avoiding-car-emergencies-with-your-senses/

Times Square in New York City was named "Tagore's Square" for one day to celebrate the Nobel Laureate's 100th B'day: please do it again

Please sign the petition online to ask the NYC Mayor to rename the Time Square again on the poet's 150th B'day: http://www.petitiononline.com/rabin150/petition.html

acknldg.dipanjan.email

Science is Impossible

Why? then read on....http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/57903/

I love that part:

QUOTE
We use our senses and instruments to extend them to try to map reality (at least those bits we care about) onto our consciousness and perceive that the map we collectively share is the reality.

....
....

the "map" is not the reality. So the endeavor is, therefore, impossible.

UNQUOTE

acknldg.dipanjan

Amazing correspondence

I always wondered looking at the facts that sometimes different disciplines in science/engineering have striking similarity in the final result : no matter what principles you are studying, the final equations look similar across multiple disciplines. One such example is the Arrhenius type dependence of many processes (generally if you have to overcome some energy barrier to do something then it is highly likely that you will end up getting an Arrhenius dependence). I just came across a simple relation called Amdahl's Law (https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/parallel_comp/) which states that if you are parallelizing a computer program/code, the potential program speedup (x) can be defined by the fraction of code (p) that can be parallelized or,

          1
x = ------------;
         1 - p

Now while taking the polymer engineering class, I learned about the special case of Carother's equation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carothers_equation) where the degree of polymerization (x_n) is related to the conversion (p) as follows:


              1
x_n = ------------
             1 - p

You need to have a very high amount of conversion (~ 99%) in order to get a really long polymer chain. What amazes me is the striking similarity between these two simple equations which are from two unrelated fields, but still analogous. Nature surely has only a few main principles or rules --  everything else can just be explained through analogy. We just have to unravel those simple rules -- are we there yet?