Enliven your living space with books

Are you are a book lover? Do you  throw around books in your  room or stack them neatly in a rack after reading? Or you are one of them who feels uncomfortable in a room with books and clothes arranged neatly where they belong? Whatever the case your room will certainly look nice if you don’t pile up or scatter books and magazines in your bed or your bedside space.

Have you ever thought of using your books and magazines as decorative pieces (you will read them of course) instead of something that collects dust and comes in your way whenever you try straightening up your room? If you haven’t, then should give it a try at least once. You can utilize the unused space in your room or even your hallway or corridor (considering their size) to place the books and other reading materials in an attractive way.

While choosing a bookshelf for your home, it is advisable to keep the earthquake possibility on your mind. So don’t go for big towering racks and stack them with huge volumes which will come tumbling down on your head with the slightest tremour. It is safe to clamp such racks securely to the wall. Solid ground level box racks are best for heavy volumes. If your tomes are leather-bound and have gold-embossed titles, they certainly can look as beautiful as any other showpieces. You can place a potted plant (green non-flowering leafy variety) besides them in a wrought-iron stand to enhance that space.

You can choose cane bookracks for the magazines and your bedside books. They come in a variety of designs and sizes. You can neatly arrange your books in the rack when you feel like doing so or just shove in your reading materials when you feel too lazy to put them back properly. When you do so, you don’t end up treading upon them when you wake you sleepy in the morning or come groping for the light switch at night.

If you have an ornate chair or table in your room, you can place your bookshelf next to it. Both will complement each other perfectly. If you have precious volumes which you rarely go through, you can neatly stack them in a rack and place a statue next to them. Both will get noticed.

If you have cookery books and some space in your kitchen you can spare for a small bookstand, you can keep those books where they come handy. Cookery books usually have beautiful coverjackets and they will certainly add colour to your kitchen.

Books and magazines can give a cheery look to any corner in your home. In fact it’s difficult to imagine a home where there is nothing to read in the leisure hours. When you think of utilising an unused space in your home next time, try to see if you can fit a bookcase there.

January night sky

DR DEEPAK RAJ PANT

The sky-map shows the sky as  seen from Kathmandu at 11:00  P.M. tonight. Put the map over your head facing downwards so that the directions north, south, east and west are correctly orientated. The centre of the map marks the zenith, the point directly overhead (indicated by a cross). The circular edges of the map represent the horizons. Two difficulties usually pose for the observer. First, you have to locate the objects. Then, you have to identify them. Sometimes, this can be tough for sky-watchers on the chilly mid-winter night, logging at hectic pace because we see many twinkling objects on a clear, dark, moonless night. Some are bright, others barely visible. The sky-map and the table will guide you. Correlate the sky-map with the heavenly objects you spot in the sky. Larger dots show brighter stars of lower magnitude, as also bright planets Jupiter and Saturn. The lines reveal the constellations. The table gives the brighter celestial objects name, position and constellation.

Stars and planets travel westward during the night. Most celestial objects rise and set. Azimuth (Az) is the angular distance measured from north towards the eastward around the horizon; north, east, south and west have Az: 0 degree, 90 degrees, 180 degrees and 270 degrees respectively. Altitude (Alt) is the angular distance of a star above the horizon (0 degree); the zenith and the horizon are exactly 90 degrees apart.

If we look carefully, we can make out colours in the stars that indicate its surface temperature. The hottest star gives a blue colour and the coldest star red. On the southern and south-central sky, lies the constellation Orion on which are placed bright stars: Betelgeuse (red), Rigel (blue-white) and Bellatrix (blue). The constellation Canis Major is on the southern and southeastern sky containing the brightest star Sirius (white) and the bright star Procyon (white-yellow). Looking more like the sphinx, find the constellation Leo on the eastern sky. The bright blue star on this constellation is Regulus ("little king"), occasionally named as "The royal star". The constellation Auriga is on the north-central sky with its lead star Capella (yellow). The brightest celestial object in the sky is the planet Jupiter which will dominate the eastern sky, opting itself to position near the constellation Cancer. Above your head, contain two constellations (Taurus and Gemini), a rich-mixture of colorful stars and a beauty planet Saturn. The star Elnath is blue-white; Aldebaran is orange; Betelgeuse is red; Bettatrix is white. Locate the visual binary star Caster on the northeastern central sky. With a powerful binocular or good telescope, you can see a pair of stars so close together that they appear to the naked eye as a single point of light because they eclipse each other.

More than half of stars in the sky are a part of a multiple star system. Another way of saying this is as follows. Pick five stars at random and look at them under high magnification. Two will turn out to be double. Science fiction writers and ‘space artists’ use some of the favorite settings on planets in a binary star system. They visualise many exotic and spectacular sights. Imagine if our sun were a binary star from Earth, we would view two suns in the sky at once. One sun is setting while the other is rising. We would have no night. Is this just fantasy? Could there really be planets orbiting in a binary star system? The answer is yes, there could be. Although the scenery in a binary system might be very beautiful and bizarre, there is little doubt that we are better off in a system with a single sun because in many cases planets in binary systems are uninh abitable.

During the month of January, the sun passes from Sagittarius to Capricornus. Today the moon (Rises: 8:49am, Sets: 7:39pm, Illumination: 9.4 percentage) is 2.93 days old and has the phase Waxing Crescent. Tomorrow the sun rises: 6:40am, sets: 5:08pm and the astronomical twilight time begins: 5:15am, ends: 6:36pm.

‘Cloning’ sect has kept work well hidden

Gina Kolata and Kenneth Chang

Clonaid, the company that says it  has produced the first human  clone, has made astonishing claims in the past that were not substantiated. And the journalist whom Clonaid has appointed to authenticate its latest claim was once an intermediary between a couple who wanted cloning services and a scientist who wanted to provide them, the scientist says.

Clonaid was founded in 1997 by Claude Vorilhon, the leader of a religious sect that believes space travelers populated Earth through cloning and that humanity’s mission is to clone. When he formed the company, the leader, who calls himself Rael, had an express purpose in mind, Clonaid’s vice president, Thomas Kaenzig, said in an interview this week.

"It was a project to create controversy," Kaenzig said. "That was his mission, to wake people up." Though the company advertised a cloning service, it was hardly ready to provide it. For three years, Clonaid "was just a post office box in the Bahamas," Kaenzig said. "There was no research going on."

But by the spring of 2001, Clonaid’s research director, Brigitte Boisselier, who is a chemist, a Raelian bishop and now the company’s chief executive, had begun telling of a secret Clonaid laboratory in the United States.

"She was very coy about it," said an official at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, whose approval would have been required for any human-cloning work in the United States. "She said, ‘I have a lab, but I won’t tell you where it is.’"

But the food and drug agency’s office of criminal investigation soon found it, in a rented room at an abandoned high school in Nitro, West Virginia.

The environment there was hardly ideal for research, said the official, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity. Insects flew through the open windows, possibly from a nearby barn. "There was no place where sterile conditions could be had," the official said, and the researcher there was a graduate student who seemed woefully unprepared. "The lab notebooks were reviewed by our staff scientists," the agency official said. "They were inadequate" to document scientific research.

The work under way was not even with human cells. The graduate student had obtained cow ovaries from a slaughterhouse and was trying to extract eggs from them. "The notebooks had a sketchy page and a half: ‘We went to the slaughterhouse and got some ovaries,’" the official reported.

But the equipment in the lab was state of the art, the official said. It had been bought by a grieving father whose 10-month-old son had died of congenital heart disease and who wanted to clone him. The father, Mark Hunt, a lawyer and former West Virginia state legislator, had obtained the equipment from a fertility lab that was going out of business. Accounts of how much he paid vary, but Michael Guillen, the journalist appointed by Clonaid in the current case, said on an ABC News television program a year ago that Hunt had spent $200,000.

After its inspection of the Clonaid lab, the food and drug agency official said, the agency reached an agreement with Hunt that he would not proceed any further in trying to have his dead son cloned in this country without the agency’s permission. Hunt, who did not return repeated telephone calls seeking comment, later sold the laboratory equipment in Nitro and closed the lab, the agency says. He also publicly broke off from the Raelians, saying they were too avidly seeking publicity.

The company then moved its operations out of the country, Kaenzig said.

He added that the company had begun by learning to create cow embryo clones and that by the fall of 2001 it had created its first cloned human embryo.

Many learned of Hunt and his travails from Guillen, whose doctorate, from Cornell, is in theoretical physics, mathematics and astronomy. On Sept. 7, 2001, when he was a science editor for ABC News, Guillen interviewed Hunt and his wife, Tracy, on "20/20 Downtown" and showed a video of their baby, Andrew, who had died in 1999. Guillen did not describe the lab’s inadequacies on that program, but he did say that Boisselier was being investigated for fraud and reported that she had moved her cloning efforts out of the country. (Citing confidentiality concerns, federal law enforcement authorities would not confirm or deny anything that Guillen said about the investigation.)

Only seven months earlier, Guillen had reported that Clonaid was on the brink of success. "I met with Dr. Boisselier, who is the scientific director, and she told me that in two weeks they’re expecting to conceive the first human clone, implant it in a surrogate mother and hoping for a pregnancy in March," he reported on "20/20" on Feb. 16, 2001. "Ready or not, the technology is on its way." Soon another scientist who was interested in cloning met the Hunts. In an interview Tuesday, that scientist, Panos Zavos, founder and director of the Andrology Institute of America, in Lexington, Kentucky, said that Guillen had told him he could send the Hunts to talk to him, but that in return Guillen wanted exclusive rights to their story.

Zavos, who says his work on human cloning is taking place outside the country, ended up seeing the Hunts, but Guillen was unable to negotiate an exclusive agreement with him, because he had already made an agreement with a documentary filmmaker, Peter Williams. Guillen did not return repeated calls Tuesday to his office and to his agent’s office.

Zavos said he had not cloned yet and had not taken any money from Hunt. He said he wanted to get the technique to work first with cells taken from living people before trying it with stored frozen cells from the dead.

Baby said to be clone goes home A baby said to be the first human clone has gone home with her mother, according to Clonaid, The Associated Press has reported. The baby, nicknamed "Eve," went home Monday, said a Clonaid spokeswoman, Nadine Gary. The company has refused to say where her home is, or where Eve was born on Dec. 26. The unidentified mother is a 31-year-old American, Clonaid officials said at a news conference last week in Hollywood, Florida.

Meanwhile, Bernard Siegel, a lawyer, has asked a judge in Broward County Circuit Court to appoint a guardian for the baby. Siegel said that Clonaid was trying to commercially exploit the child and that she needed specialized medical treatment.

(International Herald Tribune)

Chronobiology, rhythms in bio-systems

Dr B H Paudel

Chronobiology is the study of  rhythms that are present in the biological system. Our biological rhythms, best exemplified by the rhythm of a healthy heart or wake-sleep cycle or the female menstrual cycle, are the keystones of chronobiology. Our body has internal clocks. Chronobiology examines how the body’s internal clocks control the body change throughout the day, affecting blood pressure, blood coagulation, blood flow and other functions. In other words, chronobiology is the study of temporal changes in living matter, including biological rhythms in development and aging in individuals and populations. Rhythmicity (oscillation) lies in the centre of chronobiology.

The field of chronobiology has already been recognised as a scientific medical discipline. The purpose of chronobiology is to understand the fundamental operations of the sleeping-waking brain. This field is being explored by a variety of biologist-scientists and doctors. Worldwide research works are going on, to understand how rhythmicity is produced and controlled in health and disease; to improve treatments for sleep-related medical and psychiatric disorders; and to eliminate human performance inefficiencies resulting from shift work, time zone travel (jet lag), and abnormal sleep-wake activity. The knowledge of chronobiology is also implicated in cancer, mood, sexual dysfunction, hypertension, work safety, drug efficacy, and other matters relating to human and animal behaviour.

In common parlance if two friends are very close to each other we say, "they have same wavelengths". They understand each other very well and they are in good harmony. Matching the "wavelengths" may be important for stability in a relation between husband and wife. Interestingly, society also may have cycles, and historians believe that the phenomenon of war and peace occurs in rhythmic fashion. And may be also the political status of our country, which has a cycle of 10 to 12 years!

In the physical world, at ordinary temperatures, the atoms in any molecule are in a state of vibration (oscillation). Therefore, it is not difficult to believe that every particle of all living creatures is in vibratory motion. Like many life sciences, chronobiology is a field that has transitioned from the whole organism level, to anatomical dissection, to molecular analysis. At the molecular level, a biological clock is a system of oscillating levels of proteins, controlled by transcription factors, which are proteins that turn particular genes on or off. Young’s group reported, in the medical journal – Science, on the molecular workings of a major clock in Drosophila (fruit fly or banana-fly, a widely used insect for genetic research) consisting of two proteins that control and carry out oscillation. The emerging biochemical view of circadian (a cycle of 24 hours) and other biological rhythms is revealing how organisms assess and respond to oscillating environmental cues that result from the Earth’s movements. The earth’s movement itself is an oscillation that causes sunset and sunrise resulting into a light and dark cycle. Revolution of the Sun by the Earth causes oscillation in seasons. "All biological clocks are adaptations to life on a rotating world," says William Schwartz, a professor of neurology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.

During our lifetime, our health does not remain constant at one level; it fluctuates and we do not infrequently acquire diseases. Our mental health cyclically undergoes phases of worry/sadness and happiness. If any one of the phases extremely prolongs or shortens, we may develop disease. One of the best examples of such illnesses is cyclical alternation of mania and depression. This rhythm is closely associated with lunar cycle (month). Similarly, our eating habit has a cyclic pattern. We eat at certain intervals. Our digestive system is trained to secrete stomach juice at these intervals. Therefore, stomach juice secretion coincides with timing of eating even if no food is delivered to the stomach.

Depending on the strength and dimension of zeitgeber (external stimulus) our internal rhythms get adjusted. The internal rhythm setter – suprachiasmatic nucleus (internal biological clock) sends information to other rhythms of the body. In humans, this part of brain lies in hypothalamus about 6-7 cm behind the nasal bridge. Rhythms of hormone release constitute a common feature of almost all endocrine systems. These rhythms vary over minutes to hours (ultradian), days (circadian), weeks or even longer periods (infradian) depending upon the body’s requirement, zeitgeber or nature of endocrine gland.

Autonomic nervous system, which controls functions of the internal organ, also has its rhythm of work. Circadian rhythms, thermo-regulation, and the sleep-wake cycle profoundly affect autonomic nervous function and they have important implication in human disease. Cyclic fluctuations in function of autonomic nervous system during sleep cause rhythmic changes in blood pressure, heartbeat, and body temperature.

Heartbeat and respiration also have their own cycles. Fluctuation in heartbeat in normal health follows the phases of the respiratory cycle. Change in rate of respiration changes rate of heartbeat. A relaxed state of mind produces a slower respiratory rate and a decrease in heartbeat. This is seen when a person is doing meditation or a relaxation procedure. Thus, we can consciously modulate and, to some extent, correct some of the rhythms of our body.

Different oscillating signals keep on interacting with each other in our body e.g., the heartbeat may be affected by sleep disturbances or disturbances in sleep-wakeful cycle. At a given time, there may be interaction among many signals. This leads to generation of a resultant oscillating signal having many constituent signals. Nowadays, this resultant biological signal can be decomposed using computerised method of spectral analysis into its constituent components. It is analogous to light decomposition into different constituent colours i.e., rainbow.

Early studies in this field focused on documenting the existence of biological rhythms, and then on identifying parts of the nervous system that could be in place of a clock mechanism. There are even evolutionary evidences that the biological clock mechanisms may help in determining the origin of species. Today, scientists also have gone to the extent of finding out biological clock genes, and they are pinpointing the genes responsible for periodicities as shown in banana-fly. In the seventies, a breakthrough was made by the discovery of the 24-hour (circadian) cycle in a rat brain. At about the same time, Ron Konopka and Seymour Benzer discovered the gene period (per) responsible for circadian rhythm.

Researchers have long suspected that biological clocks are both ancient and essential, simply because all organisms seem to have some variation on the clock theme, from bacteria to complex plants, fungi, and animals. "The species today may look different, but in the long run, I’d bet this kind of strategy - a biological clock - is widespread in evolution," says Michael Young, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and director of the Centre for Biological Timing at Rockefeller University. Different species that have clock molecules in common suggest descent from a common ancestor, Young states. Biological clocks provide two functions, namely, they permit awareness of local change, like a sundial, and they measure the passage of time, like an hourglass. "This allows the organism to maintain an internal temporal order, and to anticipate change. If you are a mouse, it is useful to be able to anticipate when an eagle will fly and already be in your burrow, rather than be caught scurrying into it," he adds.

As the field evolved scientifically, at the same time, human applications were becoming more apparent such as jet lag, shift-worker problems, and sleeping disorders. It is important to point out here that an age-old saying "early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise," suggests us to manage our daily cycle of sleep and wakefulness. After going through different examples of oscillations it is concluded that physiologically our body is a resultant oscillation having innumerable constituent oscillations inside it. It appears that beauty lies in the presence of appropriate rhythms in structure and function. Males are unlucky in terms of infradian rhythm; they have less number of rhythms!

(The author is at the Department of Physiology, BP Koirala Institute of Health sciences)

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