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TICKING CLOCKS AND CHANGING TIMES

The circadian pacemaker encodes the body’s response to
seasonal change. Johanna Meijer and her group have a twisting
tale of how their work on pacemaker cells revealed exceptions
to the limit cycle oscillator theory. As we arrive at a consensus,
do the results have more profound imports?

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My first moment of Eureka!!!

Food, water and shelter...are these the only indispensables for man? Well not for an eccentric man, I mean a scientist-in-the-making. Years of fidgiting in a doomed lab can mean nothing at the end. But relax, there's one possibility. Charm? Well, I still dont have a clue what I could call it, what I witnessed a while ago. Neurons under the fluorescence microscope. You wouldnt expect a geek to stay past eight at night on a summer Friday evening, would you? But there was this hunch right from the beginning of this momentous day. Even before I finished that final lap of my experiment. Infact, the hunch was subdued in my guts since the very beginning of this week. A week that would end my first complete year as a PhD student. I walked to this field with much enthusiasm, but I saw my energy getting drained down with one failure after another. At first it was a whole different subject, I despised it. Changed my lab after seven valuable months. Changed my project, my supervisor, my city, my living style, my free-time! And then were those guileless days, when I was aware of all that lay front and behind my project and my subject but lacked the skill to perform my experiments. I still remember those challenging times...when nights were long (it was winter too) and dreams were scary. Though I had the contentment of having found my heart (Neuroscience), I had little courage to venture forward in this unbeaten path. Eyes blindfolded, hands unskilled, mind confused...but a heart that bore a little hope that things would be better. This was the feeling that lurked in me until a while ago. So, it's been quite a bit of a journey, one and a half years of PhD life, until I finally discovered my discovery. My moment of Eureka. One after another my slides, as I observed them under the "scope" looked like they were talking to me in a language that I had put forward in my research proposal. The same words, I heard them repeat. And when I called my "usually-err-not-so-nice" boss to look at what I have done, she finally exclaimed, "Madhu, you have golden hands. Yeaaa. You made my day!" And so did I make mine.

The most eventful day of my life (so far;)): May 08, 2009. Worth living!!

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