Blogger: My Inward Eye..... - Create post

LinkWithin

http://kundha.blogspot.com http://prajaktad.blogspot.com

Friday, November 15, 2013

PLANTS CAN ‘THINK’ AND ‘REMEMBER’

PLANTS CAN ‘THINK’ AND ‘REMEMBER’.

Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose 1859-1937

 
 
TOUCH ME NOT……(Mimosa Pudica) Yes, it is the name of the plant, it is also called chueemuee is a sensitive plant. The moment you touch it its leaves they almost instantaneously fold together and the leaf stalk droops. This sometimes sets off a chain of reactions, with several leaf stalks falling on top of one another. This touch-induced movement of leaves is known scientifically as thigmonasty, and is thought to be a defensive mechanism against grazers. At night, the leaves will also fold and bend in movements known as nyctonastic movements (reaction to absence of light). Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose, generally known as J C Bose was an Indian scientist who discovered and proved in the world that plants also have life. They consume food and sleep during nights, and wake up early in the mornings. Pain and pleasures are there for plants too. They also have birth, growth and death, as human beings. These are the discoveries of J. C. Bose.

Mimosa Pudica

 
 
I remember, during my college i had demonstrated one of the experiments of Dr. J. C Bose. How the plants(Mimosa Pudica) responded to touch. He demonstrated that plants are also sensitive to heat, cold, light, noise and various other external stimuli. Bose contrived a very sophisticated instrument called Crescograph which could record and observe the minute responses because of external stimulants. It was capable of magnifying the motion of plant tissues to about 10,000 times of their actual size, which found many similarities between plants and other living organisms.
 
 

Arabidopsis plants

 
 
Jagdish Chandra Bose was an Indian Physicist who pioneerd the investigation of radio and microwave optics. He took interest in Botany and Zoology too. J C Bose wrote on 1) The Nervous mechanism of plants.2) Response in the living and the non living. These books were world world famous. Plants, scientists say, transmit information about light intensity and quality from leaf to leaf in a very similar way to our own nervous systems. These “electro-chemical signals” are carried by cells that act as “nerves” of the plant .

Florescence Imaginging

 
 
Plants can ‘think’ and ‘remember’ Plants are able to “remember” and “react” to information contained in light, according to researchers. The researchers used fluorescence imaging to watch the plants respond In their experiment, the scientists showed that light shone on to one leaf caused the whole plant to respond. The plant] has a specific memory for the light which builds its immunity against pathogens, and it can adjust to varying light conditions.

chemical reactions in leaves not exposed to light

 
 
“So the plants perform a sort of biological light computation, using information contained in the light to immunise themselves against diseases that are prevalent during that season.” 
 
 
 

GALAXIES

Sombrero Galaxy

A galaxy is an enormous collection of a few million to trillions of stars, gas, and dust held together by gravity. They can be several thousand to hundreds of thousands of light-years across. Galaxies with less than a billion stars are considered “small galaxies.” In our own galaxy, the sun is just one of about 100 billion stars. Galaxy Origins Most astronomers suggest that galaxies formed shortly after a cosmic “big bang” that began the universe some 10 billion to 20 billion years ago. In the milliseconds following this explosion, clouds of gases began to coalesce, collapse, and compress under gravity to form the building blocks of galaxies. Scientists are divided on just how galaxies first formed. Some believe that smaller clusters of about one million stars, known as globular clusters, formed first and later gathered into galaxies. Others believe that galaxies formed first and that only later did the stars within them begin to gather into smaller clusters..

Andromeda galaxy

Galaxies are classified into three main types: spiral galaxies, elliptical galaxies, and irregular galaxies. Spiral galaxies, such as the Milky Way, consist of a flat disk with a bulging center and surrounding spiral arms. The galaxy’s disk includes stars, planets, dust, and gas—all of which rotate around the galactic center in a regular manner. This spinning motion, at speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second, may cause matter in the disk to take on a distinctive spiral shape like a cosmic pinwheel. Some spiral galaxies obtain even more interesting shapes that earn them descriptive names, such as sombrero galaxies…
 Ring galaxy
Older stars reside in the bulge at the center of the galactic disk. Many new stars also form in spiral systems, and their disks are surrounded by a halo, which scientists believe is rich with mysterious dark matter. Elliptical galaxies are shaped as their name suggests. They are generally round but stretch longer along one axis than along the other. Elliptical galaxies contain many older stars, up to one trillion, but little dust and other interstellar matter. Their stars orbit the galactic center, like those in the disks of spiral galaxies, but they do so in more random directions. ….

Tadpole Galaxy

The universe’s largest known galaxies are giant elliptical galaxies, which may be as much as two million light-years long. Elliptical galaxies may also be small, in which case they are dubbed dwarf elliptical galaxies. NGC 5866, an example of a lenticular galaxy Peculiar galaxies are galactic formations that develop unusual properties due to tidal interactions with other galaxies. An example of this is the ring galaxy, which possesses a ring-like structure of stars and interstellar medium surrounding a bare core. A ring galaxy is thought to occur when a smaller galaxy passes through the core of a spiral galaxySuch an event may have affected theAndromeda Galaxy, as it displays a multi-ring-like structure when viewed in infrared radiation. A lenticular galaxy is an intermediate form that has properties of both elliptical and spiral galaxies. These are categorized as Hubble type S0, and they possess ill-defined spiral arms with an elliptical halo of stars.Barred lenticular galaxies receive Hubble classification SB0.) I Galaxies that are not spiral or elliptical are called irregular galaxies. Irregular galaxies appear misshapen and lack a distinct form, often because they are within the gravitational influence of other galaxies close by…. Today we classify galaxies mainly into two major groups following Hubble’s examples. Elliptical galaxies range from round shapes (E0) to oval shapes (E7). Spiral galaxies have a pinwheel shape and are classified according to their bulge, as well as how tightly their arms are wrapped around the bulge. They range from Sa, which has a large bulge and tight, smooth arms, to Sc, which has a small bulge and loose, lumpy arms. Barred spiral galaxies classified as SB are pinwheel-shaped and have a distinct “bar” of stars, dust and gas across their bulge.

Antennae galaxy

They range from an SBa, which has a bar across its large bulge and tight, smooth arms, to an SBc, which has a bar across its small bulge and loose, lumpy arms. Irregular galaxies have no definite shape but still contain new stars, gas, and dust. The closest spiral galaxy is Andromeda, a galaxy much like our own Milky Way. It is 2.2 million light years away from us. Andromeda is approaching our galaxy at a rate of 670,000 miles per hour. Five billion years from now it may even collide with our Milky Way galaxy. I

Fork

Hubbles classification of galaxies.

Pinwheel galaxy

Its a Spiral galaxy.

Lenticular galaxy.

Its also known as NGC 5866


HUMAN EVOLUTION

Evolution

 The term human in human evolution refers to genus Homo. This genus diverged from the Australopithecines about 2 million years ago in Africa. Scientists have estimated that humans deviated from their common ancestor chimpanzees about 5 to 7 million years ago. Due to the morphological and anatomical similarities between the apes and humans, scientists believed that the great apes were the closest biological relatives of human beings.

HOMO

Homo is the genus which includes modern man and its close relatives. It is about 2.5 million years old and evolved with the Homo habilis species. Its appearance coincides with the evidence of stone tools and the beginning of the Lower Paleolithic Age. Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo antecessor, Homo cepranensis, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo georgicus, Homo ergaster, Homo rhodesiensis, Homo sapiens andHomo floresiensis were the species from the genus homo. Except Homo sapiens, all species have become extinct.
 Neanderthral
Homo neanderthalensis and Homo floresiensis who were the last surviving species, disappeared around 12,000 to 24,000 years ago respectively. Humans first evolved in Africa, and much of human evolution occurred on that continent. The fossils of early humans who lived between 6 and 2 million years ago come entirely from Africa.

Jumpstyle Evolution

Early humans first migrated out of Africa into Asia probably between 2 million and 1.8 million years ago. They entered Europe somewhat later, between 1.5 million and 1 million years. Species of modern humans populated many parts of the world much later. For instance, people first came to Australia probably within the past 60,000 years and to the Americas within the past 30,000 years or so. The beginnings of agriculture and the rise of the first civilizations occurred within the past 12,000 years.

Lucy

Early human fossils and archeological remains offer the most important clues about this ancient past. These remains include bones, tools and any other evidence (such as footprints, evidence of hearths, or butchery marks on animal bones) left by earlier people. Usually, the remains were buried and preserved naturally.

Ape Skeletons

Onefossil discovery above all has transformed views of how we became human. But who was Lucy, and why is she so important to human evolution? Lucy was discovered in 1974 by anthropologist Professor Donald Johanson and his student Tom Gray in a maze of ravines at Hadar in northern Ethiopia. Johanson and Gray were out searching the scorched terrain for animal bones in the sand, ash and silt when they spotted a tiny fragment of arm bone.

Hall of Human Origin

Discovery of a lifetime Johanson immediately recognised it as belonging to a hominid. As they looked up the slope, they saw more bone fragments: ribs, vertebrae, thighbones and a partial jawbone. They eventually unearthed 47 bones of a skeleton – nearly 40% of a hominid, or humanlike creature, that lived around 3.2 million years ago. Based on its small size, and pelvic shape, they concluded it was female and named it ‘Lucy’ after ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, the Beatles song playing on the radio when Johanson and his team were celebrating the discovery back at camp.

Homo Sapiens

The rare laughing species The humans are known to possess a rare quality that distinguishes them from the rest of the animals: smile and laughter!
 

Monday, October 7, 2013

The Good Old Kashmir.

The Good Old Kashmir
 
 
I WANDERED lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze…William wordsworth




My father was a major in the army.  He was posted to Srinagar in
the year 1960.  Our happy go family of five sisters three
brothers mother and father travelled a lot.  Travel is your
best teacher.  We learnt the different languages culture
traditions of all sorts of people.  One gets to learn the
different art and knowlege of that particular region.  The
natural beauty, scenery has carved a permanent image of
paradise in our minds.  Kashmir was known as the switzerland!

The beautiful gardens the waterfalls the mountains the climate
the rich fruits and flowers, daffodils Nargis etc are breathtaking!  Where ever father
was stationed in gulmarg pehalgam tunmarg etc we children and
some jawans assisting us used to reach him by trekking.  Horse
ride skating skiing was a usual sport there. On reaching we
replenished our mugs of kashmiri chai(tea) and hot
kulchas(local bread).  It was simply amazing experience.

At Srinagar, our schools used to close during heavy snowfall in
winter.  On reopening we rushed to meet our pals.
Our teacher was very kind she used to warm our frozen
fingers with the help of Kangri(earthern pot basket with hot
charcoal). Unity of all religion hindu muslim sikh chritian etc
all sailed in the same boat with love and peace.
Incredible India it was!

Years passed we grew got settled in different states.  Once we
were in Roorkee, attending some conference. We ladies went for
sight seeing.  I encountered a Muslim family.  The middle age
lady  was wearing black dress called burkha.  Her two young
beautiful daughters  were with her.  Their beauty had definitely
won the glance.  I broke the silence and introduced myself. We
chatted during our visit.  I was thrilled to meet them my past
memories of Srinagar had flashed, but their serene faces
reflected anguish.  "You want to know how our land is" the
woman said.  She bent low towards her feet to show the scars of
the bomblast she suffered while shopping in the streets. their
tensions for the children return from schools and colleges
were constant.  There was no amount of security anywhere.  Daily
murder clashes and rape reigned.  The turmoil in Kashmir
Between the neighboring nations politicians had virtually killed
the innocent Kashmiris.  Many fled as the terrorist gunned the
civilians. A pall of gloom spread over the state.  Tears rolled
down her cheek, her voice choked, "we are strangers in our
homeland." I was shocked and felt the pangs.No amount of
consolation could appease their sorrow.

Years later, it seems there seems some peace is returning and
things being normalized.  It was heartening to hear Music
recitals from renowned personals reverberating in the lush
green valleys  A sincere prayer to the Almighty for peace and
happiness of the people of Kashmir!

My above writeup got published in The Hitavada dt 5th Oct.'13

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Monday, April 15, 2013


  How you can talk with God/ A Spiritual Experience!
In moments when the inner lamps are lit
And the life’s cherished guests are left outside,
Our Spirit sits alone and speaks to its gulfs.
(Shri Aurobindo (Savitri)
It was late evening, I peeped through my window.  The sky had turned scarlet .  The birds had flown in  to their nests.  This hour was very special.  I lit the evening lamp.  The perfume of the insence sticks engulfed the house.  The noisy day was somewhat quiet now.  My evening prayes had commensed.  After the prayers I loved to stay in this quiet mood.  Years back, i recalled a lovely story I had read.  It was about a rich woman she asks her Master(spiritual) that inspite of having all the comforts  wealth a good loving husband, children house everything in life, she feels empty and something missing in her life. What& Why?   To this the spiritual Master replies …”A part of our mind remains empty even if all the riches happiness of this world we get.  We must fill this gap initially by prayers to Almighty.  We have to build right climate (moral and psychological purification is necessary)  .  Just as we leave our shoes ouside before we enter the temple , we have to leave certain shoes before we enter the sanctuary of meditation…Shri Aurobindo
Daily this prayers has to be exercised.”  Further, he explained her how to practice meditation.                The woman obeyed him.  She sat on a sofa in her room closed her eyes and sat for meditation as instructed by the Master, daily..for considerable span.  After  some time she visited the spiritual Master and thanked him .  She no more had that feeling of emptiness. Moreover , peace prevailed. The real meaning of Life had unfolded to her!
“This is how we talk with the Almighty”,said the Master.   “Daily giving few minutes of silent  communion .  In the beginning with a short praise ,  reciting his name etc few minutes of deep breathing then keeping silence in body and mind.  This quietude leads us to peace and then his love starts pouring wisdom dawns, your heart is full of his grace which overflows in the form of tears at times.” He explained.
The saints say you cry for the worldly things all your life have you wept for the Almighty , who has created you and this beautiful creation the Universe.  Have we thanked him?
You are here to enable the Divine purpose of the universe to unforld.
This is how important you are!…Echart Tolle
Once Swamy Vivekananda had asked Shri Ramakrishna, have you seen God ?
“Yes”, replied the Master,. “I see him just as I see you here, only in a much intenser sense.” “The magic touch of the Master that day immediately brought a wonderful change over my mind. I was astounded to find that really there was nothing in the universe but God! … everything I saw appeared to be Brahman. ”…Swamy Vivekananda
Ask and it shall be given to you
Knock and it shall open to you
Seek and it shall be reaveled to you
Words of the Lord (Jesus Christ) ringing in my ears…
One touch one glance of the Master changes the whole life…I pondered
I had sat in this mood for quite some time.
‘ For oft on my couch I lie,
In vacant or in pensive mood, they flash upon my Inward Eye in the Bliss of Solitude’….William Wordsworth
By Prajakta Dighe
Myabove article got published in The Hitavada dt. 20/4/2013