TIDES…….

The high tides in Mumbai were definitely terrific ones.The Mumbaikars enjoyed this tides that were very vigorous. The rays of sun flashing out from the dark clouds were creating an illusion wherein the sky was seeming to appear as the route for heaven and the rays coming out as the doors to heaven which were seeming to open for us.

High tides in Mumbai

Mangrooves

Well, I made this painting as a part of a project in Botany during my first year in Ruia college. Bhavana Ma’am gave us a list of topic out of which we ( a group of three) selected this topic. this was just a cover photo of that poster, the rest part depicted various advantages and disadvantages of mangrooves. This project was fun as it was my first active participation in any activity of the college

The well of sacrifice

JALLIANWALA BAGH MASSACRE, involved the killing of hundreds of unarmed, defenseless Indians by a senior British military officer, took place on 13 April 1919 in the heart of Amritsar (India), the holiest city of the Sikhs, on a day sacred to them as the birth anniversary of the Khalsa. Jallianwala Bagh, a garden belonging to the Jalla, derives name from that of the owners of this piece of land in Sikh times. It was then the property the family of Sardar Himmat Singh (d.1829), a noble in the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh (1780-1839), who originally came from the village of Jalla, now in Fatehgarh Sahib District of the Punjab.

Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer marched a group of sixty-five Gurkha and twenty-five Baluchi soldiers into the Bagh, fifty of whom were armed with rifles. Dyer had also brought two armoured cars armed with machine guns, however the vehicles were stationed outside the main gate as they were unable to enter the Bagh through the narrow entrance.

The Jallianwala Bagh was bounded on all sides by houses and buildings and had few narrow entrances, most of which were kept permanently locked. The main entrance was relatively wider, but was guarded by the troops backed by the armoured vehicles. General Dyer ordered troops to begin shooting without warning or any order to disperse, and to direct shooting towards the densest sections of the crowd. He continued the shooting, approximately 1,650 rounds in all, until ammunition was almost exhausted.

Apart from the many deaths directly from the shooting, a number of people died in stampedes at the narrow gates or by jumping into the solitary well on the compound to escape the shooting. A plaque in the monument at the site, set up after independence, says that 120 bodies were pulled out of the well.

The wounded could not be moved from where they had fallen, as a curfew had been declared – many more died during the night.

The well into which civilians jumped (pictured below) came to be known as the Martyrs’ well

Dyer was initially lauded by conservative forces in the empire, but in July 1920 he was censured and forced to retire by the House of Commons

Delhi Snaps

Some spots in the Jallianwala Bagh

Words of Wisdom

Could we, please, take a moment or two to contemplate on these words?

Radha krishnan

Life through Science

Some Eye Candy

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These paintings are the creation of Komal Hosnur, from the FY Microbiology batch. A very promising artist from the looks of it, Komal is also trained in Bharatnatyam.
Thanks for the contribution Komal. These are great. Wish you luck!

Some Mysteries of Biochemistry

Illustration of Hadean Eon

As I start with the very first blog, I feel compelled to go back to the Hadean Eon, the era millions of years ago when building blocks of life were formed. We know that life started in the oceans. Chemical mingling of molecules like methane, hydrogen and carbon dioxide in the underwater hydrothermal vents led biomolecules to form which are indispensable to life. The mystery of how non- living entities gave rise to living creatures still baffles me. Though, I’m sure it has something to do with thermodynamics, because that is usually the answer to questions that I can’t answer! Let just say these molecules had a negative Gibb’s free energy that favoured their spontaneous formation and self-assembly. Voila! We have our first cell.
Moving on, not only did this chance event occur in the primordial soup, it also occurred to produce selective molecules. Just like most of us prefer to perform our tasks with bias towards one hand, nature too seems to prefer the D-sugars and the L-amino acids. (Please refer link if you are confused about the terms D and L).
Chemical synthesis always produces an equimolar mixture of D and L isomers known as a racemic mixture. Efforts to chemically synthesize just a single isomer of either a sugar or amino acid have been unfruitful. Thus the probability of a biological system to synthesize only a particular isomer by chance is extremely rare. For example, for a polysaccharide composed of just 100 monosaccharides, the probability of all of them being D-sugars is one in 2^100 . This works out to be one in 1267650600228229401496703205376! So it is astonishing that the first primitive biological system preferred a single type of isomer.
The interesting fact is that in biological systems racemization occurs only after the death of the organism. The L- amino acids take longer to racemize as compared to the D-sugars. This principle has been used for estimating the age of fossils by using a technique called as amino acid dating.
If nature is in fact like us in our bias towards a particular hand, the presence of ambidextrous people might indicate the presence of an organism with racemic chiral molecules. It remains to be seen whether this is a figment of imagination or some undiscovered mystery.

References:

Click to access article35print.pdf

http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/an-evolutionary-perspective-on-amino-acids-14568445
http://science.uvu.edu/ochem/index.php/alphabetical/c-d/dl-convention/
Image courtesy : http://www.corzakinteractive.com/