Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The circadian rhythm. It’s a natural oscillation within the bodies of living things with a periodicity of a day – 24 hours (It’s why we experience jet lag). What acts as this clock in living things? Raghuveer Parthasarathy explains the concept in So Simple a Beginning : “The simplest possible oscillator is a gene that represses itself.” This sounds crazy at first: once repressed, how would it activate itself again? “The answer lies in the fact that both expression and repression take time.”   He elaborates. But first, a quick recap from an earlier blog: DNA has the gene to create the protein, and promoter and repressor sites before it. When read, the gene produces the protein (red blob) which attaches itself to the repressor site, thus physically blocking any RNA attempts to read the gene.   Coming back to the oscillator. All the above steps (creating the protein, then for the protein to “meander and find the promoter region”) take time. Ok, so it took time. But isn’t the gen...

I remember the hardest part about learning to read the time was not the minute hand part. The minute part was easy: depending on the age you were learning to do this, you used one of two techniques: -          The multiplication table of 5 (me); -          Or skip counting by 5 (my daughter). For me, the hard part back then was reading the hour. Why? Say it’s 4:50. The hour hand is almost at 5; so you had to decide the hour not only by where the hour hand was. But when it was 5:10, you had to use the decide the hour by where the hour hand was. The minute value had to be used to decide which hour value to pick… which was confusing, and insane! Now that whole confusion of the hour hand was rooted in the fact that clocks were mechanical devices and the hands moved bit by bit. In the present day, you could just read the digital display (phone, tablet, PC, laptop, or if anyone still has it, a digita...