See the new app from the Google which integrates VoIP and IM in one platform….

http://talk.google.com

The app is good but I see a potential problem here. As the company plans to keep the standards open and they have also integrated Voice. So whats next: “Talk SPAM”… In days coming, I see automated bots promoting Viagra on Google talk.. and whats more annoying than listening instead of reading..

Random list of fascinating bio-stuff:

1. Synthetic Biology: Engineering organisms from the scratch. Playing God. (Interesting area of research)

2. Mollicutes: creatures so small they contain only a billion atoms

3. Biobricks: Building blocs of synthetic organisms

4. Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, have modified a bacterium to read a word(codon) that normally means “stop making protein” as “add a weird amino acid here.”

5. Some molecules come in two mirror-image forms, like a pair of hands. Nature uses left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars. If synthetic organisms worked the other way around, they would be incapable of making use of natural foodstuffs, thus ruling out most of the ways they could disrupt natural ecosystems.

Source: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/mit_pr.html

Samir Kumar in one of his comments asked:

“Why does man want to go to the next level? Why does he want to succeed? Why the greed? Couldn’t he survive successfully before inventing machines? Couldn’t he provide himself all needed pleasures without machines? What is the point of dreams and large empires? Why not lead a simple, quite life?”

Well here is my answer:

You have just pointed out one of the most popular debates of all time: art v/s technology battle.

Well, biologically, a man works and wants to outperforms the rivals to increase the probablity of finding a better mate. Everything is a result of this. The better he is the more healty he will get his mate and better his offsprings…

He dreams of machines coz it gives him an illusion (or some part reality) of power. And power is what he carves for. Because power grants him better mate finding rates…

Just think by yourselves: Isn’t everything which you do has a biological basis?? Every great scientists to great inventors enjoy making love more than pronouncing theories….

I have attended a presentation from a BARC representative. The presentation was fun and well informative. He told us about the initiatives taken by BARC such as bannana juice, super computer, etc… I asked a lot of questions and the event let me generate a lot of ideas :)…

We also had tea with samosas provided by the princi…

I’m quite intrigued by the thought that the group of bacteria is analogous to a neural network. That is, even though a single bacteria is dumb but collectively they show “swarm intelligence”.

And also what is more astonishing is that the collection behaves much like our brain.. both have signal mechanisms, encode and sums inputs, produce outputs etc…

So I was thinking why not to train a bacterial colony to play the game of chess or perhaps use them for simple classification tasks….

For more info on this: http://www.nerdshit.com/archive/2005/04/20/intelligent_bac/

So we may call this Bio-intelligence which is analogous to Artificial Intelligence…

Perhaps future robots may contain bacteria not silicon…

Finally Pulkit booked th tickets for Singapore… We two will be leaving on 27th night 10:30 PM.. I’ll be going all alone (possibly) from my home to airport.. And then we plan to travel to Malaysia all alone for 5th of Sept…

I’ve never been to Noida all alone.. and now we are thinking of traveling to a phoren country…

For ASES 2005:

-Give people your visiting cards
-Make special contacts in Biotech, Nanotech and AI depth
-Ask professors about interships, scholorships and post graduation studies
-Make contacts with people and professors