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A rare day job related post, a couple of recent high profile Science papers have reinforced for me my decision oh so many years back as a starting grad student to focus on studying olfaction, or the sense of smell.

The first study by Jan Born's group, shows that odours specifically seem to enhance consolidation of declarative (more factual) ( Read more... )

This strip really isn't too far off the mark for a lot of grad students.


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Being scooped really is like this:


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Question frequently asked by students after missing a class ( Read more... )

"Men lead lives of quiet desparation" - Henry David Thoreau ( Read more... )

Discipline, discipline, discipline - conform, conform, conform.. If only I had a penny for every time I heard that.. Once upon a time many years ago, after 3 yrs of being the complete misfit in conservative Madras, somehow I had this romantic image of academia in the US being this haven of intellectual freedom. Some of Statements of Purpose began ( Read more... )

Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know.
Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know.
Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about.

Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

With this promising prayer begins this esoteric textbook - The Neurobiology of an ( Read more... )

I've sort of reached a point in my grad. school stint where I feel I really need to focus, design experiments with a purpose, as opposed to simply doing expts. that seem like cool things to do. Post grad-school epiphany, the logistics of juggling grading papers, doing expts. and this new focus thing had proven a little taxing ( Read more... )

.. is somewhat like this.. In other grad school related news, I've apparrently been volunteered to help motivate clueless freshmen to join grad school - have three words for them " Don't do it"!