Viswanathan K's Thoughts

I work on anaesthesia machines and ventilators. Since they are used in operating rooms and hospitals, there are well defined instructions on how to clean, disinfect and sterilize them. That includes the temperature at which they should be sterilized: 132˚C. That number initially caught my attention because it wasn’t a round number (130 or 135). Why that particular temperature? How could one be sure if that temperature would kill all microbes, even in the future?   The answer is interesting. All lifeforms on earth, or all that we have checked, from the bottom of the oceans to volcanoes to you and me, are made of the same DNA strands. And DNA strands unravel (break up) at 132˚C. In other words, the temperature for sterilization is based on the facts that (1) all life is made of DNA, and (2) 132˚C is the temperature at which DNA strands break up.   Which then raised another question: why is all life based on DNA?   In Richard Dawkins’ famous book, The Selfish Ge...

Given how dissimilar we humans appear to be from each other, I was surprised to learn that all living humans descend from a small “founding population” of about 5,000 men and 5,000 women! If it didn’t hit you, consider what this means: all 7 billion of us; the blonde and the uh, black hair; the blue eye and the brown eye; white guy and black guy; the pygmy and the Nordic giant all coming from such a small base. It’s very counter intuitive to believe that we come from such a common stock (at least for me, it was easier to imagine parallel evolution of humans in different places starting with different gene pools to explain the diversity we see). Until I saw this strip from Hagar the Horrible : Asian me feels exactly the same as the Viking, Hagar, when the wife does housework. Helping out is never an option for men. The only options we see are: -          Option 1 : Look away (it makes us feel guilty) or -    ...