Lopsided Brains Let Fish Multitask

Think you're the only person that can multitask? Think again. Your fishies in your tanks can do that too! Well, at least to some researchers at University of Padova in Italy. Who would think having a fish brain could actually mean a good thing! :P

A symmetrical face is often thought a sign of beauty, but symmetry may be a disadvantage when it comes to the brain. "Left-brained" or "right-brained" fish are more adept at handling multiple activities than fish with no hemispheric preference, according to a new study. Their ability to multitask could help explain why vertebrate brains evolved to function asymmetrically.

Scientists used to think that only humans had lateralized, or asymmetric, brains. We generally use the left side of our brain to interpret language and the right to appreciate music, for example. Recently, though, researchers have come to believe that lateralized brains are universal among vertebrates. Some think the condition may allow animals to focus on multiple stimuli at once, with each hemisphere dealing with particular cues.

Read more here.

money matters

have you guys paid your fees yet?
i cannot access my student email inbox. this is the first time i am trying to do this online thingy...something seems to be wrong!

any tips or advice from you experienced people? i have tried a combination of my user ID, upper case and lower case etc...but they keep saying invalid user name or password. as far as i know, i haven't changed the password from what they gave in the letter...

help...

Can You See It?

If you can see it, just post a comment below on what you saw cos I can never see these things, moving or not moving, animated or still. I'm hopeless with these things. My eyes are already aching and I'm having a headache after looking at it.

A Curse Upon You

I hate thieves. The next thing I hate most after wannabes are distilled water thieves. I hate them so much, I curse they will be stuck here in this hell-hole until they become zombies and give up on dreams of a happy and fulfilling life. I curse their results they obtained from using the stolen distilled water will be all screwed up for at least THREE runs, that is considering even IF they are able to get any really breakthrough results in the first place. I curse their lives to be forever filled with snatch-thieves, swindlers and robbers. I curse their careers to be always plagued with problems, evil bosses and backstabbing colleagues. I curse them to be nothing more than just worthless beings that are looked down by everyone, anywhere they go (as if they aren't already).

Wait for your turn. Your research is important and so are others'. If you take just a bottle, at least that's not that bad but it's still wrong. When you drain someone else's container when it has been sitting there the whole day and already nearly full, you deserve to have your most intimate body parts (be it a guy or a girl, I couldn't care less) chopped off, grated, sliced, shreded, crushed in a blender, passed through the grinder machine, put in an oven to dry and go through the whole process once more. Others should not be punished for your incompetence at not being able to plan your research properly. You can just FUCK OFF for all I care because obviously, you don't deserve to be here in the first place.

P/S Just so you know, my curses have bore fruit all these while with really devastating effect, so yeah I'm serious.

Of whales and chepah...

Close call: Whalers fail at IWC!

Sorry to those who aren't interested about the whales...but here's the second part of my post:

Happy Birthday Chepah!!!

we hardly see you around, but hope that you are in the best of health and state of being. wish you all things wonderful on your birthday...god bless.
thanks for being a great friend!

-lotsa best wishes from kryptiq-
when u want to belanja us? ;)

Futures in Biotech

I would just like to introduce to you all a recently launched podcast called Futures in Biotech. I've not heard it yet as it is still being downloaded but I think it will be something that would interest this group of bloggers, no? Well, at least a certain few who are mainly involved in this field but we are all scientists, right? That should be enough for us to be interested at least a teeny-weeny bit, right? Anyway, if you are interested, you can download/subscribe it through iTunes or directly download the audio file (or in the case of this blog, you can click on the green play button on the left and listen right off this blog!). New episodes are released every Wednesday (Thursday here though). It's free, you don't need to pay to listen to it. When I say subscribe through iTunes, I meant asking iTunes to manage the downloading of new episodes for you every week.

In this episode, Dr. Susan Lindquist is the guest speaker. From TWIT.tv:

Dr. Susan Lindquist is a Member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Sciences at MIT. Her discoveries in protein folding have lead to paradigm shifts in modern genetics and medicine, including how a protein called HSP90 acts as a capacitor modulate evolution, a process that can even be addressed pharmacologically and possibly used as a strategy in some forms of cancer. Her work also contributes to both our understanding of several protein folding diseases such as Parkinson's and Huntington's and seeks to tackle them head on. Lastly, we discussed her discovery on how to transform yeast prions (similar to the misfolded proteins linked to mad cow disease) into nanowires as used in nanotechnology.

whale of a tale

Some people question me why i am against some things. when i explain it to them, they laugh at my face. say i am stupid or dumb or whatever. i don't really care what people think of me. anyways, before i get carried away, i just wanted to share an article from greenpeace.

sorry to those who dislike my anti-tuna, save the whales, or even my go-screw-kfc campaigns...but this is what i really care about. and i do hope that there will be more people who will realize the destruction we are causing, and work to stop it before it keeps getting worse. :(

(picture from Greenpeace)

The Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiment

What happens when you combine 200 liters of Diet Coke and over 500 Mentos mints? It's amazing and completely insane. Is your experiment as fun as this? Watch the video and find out!

Why water freezes faster after heating

THIS ARTICLE APPEARS IN NEW SCIENTIST MAGAZINE ISSUE: 3 JUNE 2006

A common chemical process may explain a bizarre property of water that has been a mystery since the time of Aristotle ¨C how hot water can freeze more quickly than cold.

This strange and counterintuitive effect was first observed by the ancient Greek philosopher and was made famous in recent times by a Tanzanian school student called Erasto Mpemba. He noticed that the sugared milk he was using to make ice cream froze more quickly if it started out hot. But what is behind the so-called "Mpemba effect"?

According to Jonathan Katz of the University of Washington at St Louis, it's all to do with solutes. "You have to ask yourself: what does heating do to water that makes it easier to freeze?" he says. "The answer is that it precipitates out solutes."

The solutes Katz has in mind are calcium and magnesium bicarbonate, which make most drinking water "hard". When the water is heated, these precipitate out to form the solid scale that "furs" up the inside of a kettle.

Water that has never been heated still contains these solutes. As it freezes, ice crystals form, and the concentration of solutes in the remaining water becomes ever higher up to 50 times as high as normal. This lowers the freezing point of the water, just like salt sprinkled on a road in winter. "The water therefore has to cool further before it freezes," says Katz. [...]

Read more here.