A couple of days ago, I attended a Women in Science and Medicine event at NYU. I initially thought it would be more of a research and networking event, but it turned out to be something much more inspiring. The panel featured amazing women doctors and researchers who have accomplished incredible things. Rather than focusing solely on research, it was a light yet deeply personal discussion about what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal society. Growing up in a gender-neutral household, I never felt disadvantaged for being born a girl. For that, I am grateful to my mother and father.

The cells in our body, communicate with each other. This is done by means of signalling. Each cell sends out signals for either communication within the cell (autocrine) or with other cells (paracrine). How are these cells released and received? The signals secreted by the cells are called ligands, which are small molecules which find its way to other cells. All cells express receptors which are protein molecules. The ligand attaches itself to the receptors and change the structure of the receptor. The function of the ligand can vary. It can be activators, inhibitors, signalling receptor, and neurotransmitters. CellPhoneDB is a repository of ligand-receptor interacting pairs.

If anything is too big to fit in somewhere, what we all do is find ways to some how accomodate it as much as possible. Maybe sugar in a storage box, grocery in shopping bags or even free food. We either split them in different boxes or stuff them in a single container. Maximizing yield. A way for computers to work with huge files is different file formats. Which compresses the file size while also maintaining the content within. Similary, when dealing with large datasets one needs to accomodate all the data points. thousands, even millions to get the maximum value of it.

Something from the book I am reading currently- Song of the cell, made so much sense so, I wanted to record it here. The author talks about “great silences” between discoveries; specifically one after the discovery of the gene. Years of silence because everyone is trying to understand and work around the new discovery(s). Streams and valley may seem to be still but, really zoomed in they are flowing. I’d like to apply this to life. Day in day out might seem like you are not doing much. But, take a moment to step back and look at the things you are doing, its work everyday.

I got to handle HeLa cells during my undergradute, the most controversial human cell line. Ever since then, I’ve been wanting to know the history behind the cells. The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks is by far one of the most powerful, content rich books I’ve ever read in my life. I regret not reading it earlier. HeLa cells are the first ever human cancer cell line. What makes them so great is their ability to divide indefinitely outside the human body. They came form the cervical cancer of a person named Henrietta Lacks. HeLa cells were vital in so many important discoveries such as polio vaccine, telomerase, HPV linked to cervical cancer few of many.

By definition, Agent-Based Models (ABM) are small-scale computational models used to simulate the actions and interactions of agents, which may represent individuals or groups. Imagine you are a graduate researcher studying Drosophila as your model organism. To support their survival, you need to prepare a culture medium and test the effects of different variables—say, for example, how different concentrations of perfumes impact Drosophila growth. However, you’re unsure of the exact outcomes and don’t have the time to conduct multiple rounds of experiments. You want to achieve optimal results on your first attempt. This is where ABM can be useful. In this case, the Drosophila would be the agents in your model, and the culture medium would be the environment you’re trying to simulate.

PCA is a major topic in Dimension Reduction. It delivers what it says - dimension reduction. Imagine you are trying to assess students’ understanding of math by their scores. This is just 1D data. Now imagine evaluating the overall performance of several students in school by looking at scores in all subjects, their athletic performance, and their diet. This is multidimensional data. When you apply PCA, it analyzes all these factors and identifies patterns in the data. For example, if students who perform well in sports also tend to have a more monitored diet, PCA might group athletic performance and diet based on their actual correlation, not based on any assumptions.

The Hadoop Distributed File System HDFS is a file storage system. Think of it as a library with several rooms and each room having multiple books, these books that are being held in the shelves can be compared to servers that run the data stored. The way the hdfs stores data within these rooms are different it does not randomly store books. Just like a library would have sections for crime, romance and thriller novels, hdfs has sections for storing the files. There are 2 types of data now. the filesystem metadata and the application data. Each of them having dedicated server.

Life at Library Growing up, I spent a lot of time in libraries because my mother works as a librarian at the no.1 university in our state. The job seems menial in our community or country but, it’s quite a complicated space. However, I always thought my mother had a cool job. I remember my early visits to the university library in the early 2000s, rooms piled up with huge books, periodicals, and journals written in many places. I later learned that periodicals were anything released periodically and were journals a collection of research papers in a specific field. In high school, during the holidays I used to go with my mother and just browse through different sections I remember looking through the journals and looking at complicated texts written I vaguely remember reading about research on bacteria used to make cheese, something about immunology, something about space research none of which I could understand but, I’d just look through the pages.

Its going to be 3 months since Suriya and I got married. Suriya and I have been together for 8 years now but, somehow feels like we’ve know each other for longer. I’ve known suriya from school. Both of us were book worms and we used to exchange a lot of books that friendship grew into something so special that I am grateful for everyday. Looking back, our relationship was super unconventional. Suriya and I were in an on and off relationship from 2016 but, in 2018 we put a name on it. He was preparing for CAT exam while he proposed to me, and he wanted to not talk/text until his exams got over.