Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Survived from Formaldehyde Fuming

I am preferring the evening/night shift in the crowded cell culture lab to maintain peace. Another lab in day shift. One room is divided in three different compartments each facilitated with laminar hood, inverted microscope, centrifuge, liquid nitrogen tank, and incubators. My cell culture lab is one of them. Last week, as usual, when I entered the lab, pungent like smell and eye irritating environment made me to get out immediately.

I asked a colleague, next to the cell culture lab (thanks at least one was there), whether it was fumigated or not. He replied, “no”, later he said mocking me, “I don't know.” I again returned to the cell culture lab and checked every compartments of the lab and notice board. There should be notice and information for fuming, but nothing could be found as the indicator of fuming except AC was switched off and dustbin was full of waste. “Probably the smell and irritation due to this waste and no air circulation”, I assumed. I had felt such kind of odor on microbiological work, few years ago. Then I decided to work putting mask. Sooner, I felt suffocation and severe headache. It was fuming gas ! ? # Promptly, I rushed to lawn for fresh air breathing.

After 15 minutes, eye irritation reduced but headache persisted then I returned to the room immediately. Thanks I survived. Next day, though appeared in the institute but could not work due to headache. Meanwhile, the same colleague with whom yesterday I asked, bemocked me informing about the fuming. One of the research assistant (or graduate student ?) had fumed with formaldehyde to sterilize one of their compartment at the last time of office hour.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Scholarships Opportunity for Nepali in PhD, and Advanced Research

TWAS (Third World Academy of Sciences); TWAS, the academy of sciences for the developing world is one of the largest organization to promote science and technology. Nepal is the member of TWAS. Recently, TWAS has announced for various fellowships targeted in developing countries with the emphasis for women. Nepalese can apply who have completed their M.Sc. Or 4 year B.Sc. in science and engineering.

Monday, March 14, 2011

Recent Developments in HIV Therapy

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which is responsible for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), one of the public health threatening virus, needs arduous work to eliminate. Various strategies like, Reverse transcriptase (RT) Inhibitors, HIV-1 Protease Inhibitors, HIV Integrase Inhibitors, HIV Maturation Inhibitors, Viral Entry Inhibition, Gene Therapy, Immunotherapy / T-Cell Gene Therapy, etc. methods has been implicated to combat it.
I had written in the World AIDS day 2009. Detail is here in my previous post

Friday, March 11, 2011

Sometime Google, Yahoo and Bing alone or together make fool to user

Probably, all of us have noticed, the result shown by Google was different than those actually typed and intended to search. I realize this many times. I read the whole web page or pdf file recommended/indexed by Google/Yahoo/Bing search but no word even the meaning of that word could be found for a keyword (phrase) that I had searched. Sometime, in worse case, these search engine index with the web site of different language.

Why Google (or Yahoo or Bing) index these non-sense web site in their first page ? Whether any advertisement scheme or payment scheme is available, so that any web page is indexed in first page for any keyword? Or, is there bug or fault in their search engine code? Or, if high ranked webpage links to, or embed feed-proxy of low ranked web page, then the content of low ranked page is indexed to high ranked web page? Or, spider's visit mistakenly understood as owner by these search engine?

This is still mysterious that I have been willing to know the actual fact for several years. I have not mentioned any example here because it is dynamic and once mistakenly indexed site (webpage) might have corrected after a week. Sometime it makes trouble to the internet users from the countries like Nepal where internet-speed and electricity are precious.