Sigmund Freud: Father of Psychoanalysis

Sunday, May 8, 2016
Source: Notable Quotes
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian Neurologist who is considered as the Father of Psychoanalysis. He was born on 6 May 1856 and on his 160th birthday, I consider it important to share with you some details about his life:

1. Sigmund Freud was born in Austro-Hungarian empire to Galician Jewish parents. He was the first offspring and had seven younger siblings. He was born with a caul, which is a piece of membrane that can cover a newborn's head and face. It is a rare condition with a frequency of 1/80,000 births. 

2. He is considered as the Father of Psychoanalysis - it is a method of treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst.

3. He qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna. Upon completing his habilitation in 1885, he was appointed a docent in neuropathology and became an affiliated professor in 1902.

4. He was an early researcher in the field of cerebral palsy, also known as cerebral paralysis. He also hypothesized seduction theory  which was related to early childhood sexual abuse. Although, he himself later rejected his theory, however, during this theory, he popularized the concept of the unconscious mind.

5. He was an early user of cocaine and also recommended it as a stimulant and analgesic for various disorders and antidepressant

6. Freud believed that the function of dreams is to preserve sleep by representing as fulfilled wishes that would otherwise awaken the dreamer. He published books connecting dreams and the unconscious mind, namely The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905).


7. Freud proposed that the human psyche could be divided into three parts: Id, ego and super-ego. The id is the set of uncoordinated instinctual trends; the super-ego plays the critical and moralizing role; and the ego is the organized, realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego. As per the model, the super-ego can stop a person from doing certain things that one's id may want to do.

8. Freud was a believer of one God - also known as Monotheism. 

9. He has authored several books and papers. Also, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. translated from the German consists of 24 volumes.

10. Freud's redefinition of sexuality to include its infantile forms led him to formulate the Oedipus complex as the central tenet of psychoanalytical theory.

11.Freud postulated the existence of libido, an energy with which mental processes and structures are invested and which generates erotic attachments, and a death drive, the source of compulsive repetition, hate, aggression and neurotic guilt.

12. In the words of W. H. Auden's 1940 poetic tribute, by the time of Freud's death, he had become a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives.


13. There have been some accusations about his work as people suggest his data was "cooked up" and thus, his theories can't be trusted.

13. He died from cancer of the jaw on 23 September 1939.

Some of the famous quotes by Sigmund Freud are given below:

The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water. Sigmund Freud

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization. Sigmund Freud

The ego is not master in its own house. Sigmund Freud

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind. Sigmund Freud

Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me. Sigmund Freud

We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love. Sigmund Freud

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine. Sigmund Freud
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5 Fantastico Inventions of 2015!

Monday, January 25, 2016
Source: Francis Moran
The year of 2015 has been a really productive year in terms of fun and cool inventions aimed at public usage. There have been many which I really liked but here's a list of 5 fantastico inventions of 2015 for you:

1. The Ears that Hear!
Have you ever stood in a train with a very loud person talking on phone or been in a mall with a baby crying endlessly and wondered if you could mute that particular noise? Well now you can with Doppler Labs Here Active Listening Earbuds which help you select the frequencies you want to filter out or reduce the volume for. The earbuds are linked to your smart phone and you can select the particular noises which you want to filter out! Doppler Labs CEO Noah Kraft called it “augmented audio reality.”
I can think of a few people I would like to filter out! ;) 


2. The Intelligent Pan!
For all the naive cooks out there, there's a technology that lets you cook food without burning it! It's a simple application- you select a recipe from your smartphone, using bluetooth the pan will get the instructions. Based on a heat sensor, the pan will let you know when you need to flip the dish! The concept is by MIT graduates Humberto Evans and Mike Robbins - Pantelligent.
No more burned food for me atleast!


3. The Drinkable Book
Considering the large number of people who do not have access to clean drinking water, Teri Dankovich has created The Drinkable Book whose pages double as water filters when in contact with water. In tests conducted in Bangladesh, Ghana and South Africa, they were able to kill over 99% bacteria. More tests need to be conducted for other harmful contaminants, but if it is successful, it will be a great invention for providing clean drinking water to people. 
Its pages also have instructions manual on them. 


4. The Wonder Car
Tesla has launched their first luxury electric SUV which can go 250 miles on a single charge. It has a capacity of 7 people with a low centre of gravity provided by its battery. The Model X goes from 0 to 96 km/h in 3.2 seconds. This car has both awesome features of a cool car plus cleaner emissions due to the electric charging for batteries!
Vrooooooooom! :)


5. The Hoverboard Scooter
All of you must have seen the hoverboard scooter being used by the celebrities these days! This is the coolest invention which is like a hybrid between segway and skates! The Hoverboard Scooter uses electric gyroscopes to maintain balance by adjusting their body weight. 
This might be the new mode of transportation for kids to school!

So did your favourite invention make it to our list? Please let me know in the comments! :)


This blog post is inspired by the blogging marathon hosted on IndiBlogger for the launch of the #Fantastico Zica from Tata Motors. You can apply for a test drive of the hatchback Zica today.
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FoldIt - Solve Puzzles for Science!

Sunday, July 12, 2015

Science has led to a lot of progress , not only in terms of scientific knowledge but also in terms of how that information and knowledge is acquired! For all the video gamers slash science lovers, there is a perfect game for you - FoldIt. It is an online puzzle game which lets you get familiar with the protein folding problem.  University of Washington's Center for Game Science in collaboration with the UW Department of Biochemistry have developed this game as a part of experimental research. 

The objective of this game is to fold the given set of protein in a stable configuration so that none of the chains are clashing, there are no voids, and all hydrogen bonds are being sufficed, using various tools provided within the game. The highest scoring solutions of each of the difficult levels ae analyzed by researchers to find whether such structural confirmation exists in the native state in the real world! 

The beta version was released to public in May 2008 and has 240,000 registered players as per the source. Since 2008, the Foldit project has participated in Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP) experiments. CASP is an international experiment for protein structure prediction taking place every two years since 1994, which helps scientists to assess the efficacy of the protein folding predictions!


There have been quite a few remarkable accomplishments by FoldIt users. One of the most important one being deciphering the crystal structure of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus (M-PMV) retroviral protease, an AIDS-causing monkey virus and producing an accurate 3D model of the enzyme in just 10 days of release the puzzle in 2011. This problem had been bothering scientists for over 15 years! This was published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology in 2011 (link of the published study).

The other accomplishment was regarding an enzyme which catalyses the Diels-Alder reactions widely used in synthetic chemistry. A team including David Baker in the Center for Game Science at University of Washington in Seattle computationally designed this enzyme. However, the enzyme still required improvement for potency which was done by FoldIt players by adding 13 amino acids. This increased the enzyme's activity by more than 18 times, thus, making it potent! This was published in Nature Biotechnology in 2012 (link of the published study).

If you are good at video games too or folding proteins, you may try the game too - Link. There are many tutorials and videos also available to help you get started! You never know, you might be lucky enough to decode a protein which helps find the cure to another disease!

Image source: All images have been taken from FoldIt website!
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Science Fact - 21

Sunday, November 2, 2014
Some facts about human hair:

  1. On an average, people have between 100,000 and 150,000 hairs on their head.
  2. Categorically, blondes have an average of 140,000 strands, brunettes of 108,000 and redheads of 90,000.
  3. Hair grows at a rate of about 150mm a year.
  4. The number of strands normally lost in a day varies, but on average is 100.
  5. Each individual hair lasts for two to six years before it falls out.
  6. If you are nervous that you are losing an excessive amount of hair per day, you can try this trick
Take about 60 hairs between your fingers and pull, running your fingers through your hair.  Usually between 5 and 8 hairs will come out—this is normal. An excess of 15 hairs, however, is not as common and means you are losing more hair than you should be.
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Science Fact - 20

Tuesday, September 30, 2014


The word 'robot' was introduced by the Czech interwar writer Karel ÄŒapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) in 1920.

However, Karel ÄŒapek did not coin the word for the play, his brother did! Karel wrote a letter to the Oxford English Dictionary in which he named his brother, the painter and writer Josef ÄŒapek, as its actual originator.

In an article in the Czech journal Lidové noviny in 1933, he explained that he had originally wanted to call the creatures laboÅ™i ("workers", from Latin labor). However, he did not like the word, and sought advice from his brother Josef, who suggested roboti. The word robota literally means corvée, serf labor, and figuratively drudgery or hard work in Czech. It also means work and labor in many Slavic languages (e.g.: Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Polish, Macedonian, Ukrainian, archaic Czech). 


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3D Printed Ice-Cream: Ready in 15 minutes

Sunday, July 20, 2014

Ever wanted to have an ice-cream which is unique in shape than all others? Now your dream can be coming true! 

Three students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a 3-D printer which can produce an ice-cream in any desired shape in just 15 minutes. By hacking together a soft serve ice cream maker, a freezer and a 3D printer, Kyle Hounsell, Kristine Bunker, and David Donghyun Kim created a machine that extrudes soft ice cream into any given shape then quickly freezes it with a blast of liquid nitrogen. 

The trio first needed to print into a cooled environment so that the ice cream would hold its shape once printed. "We bought a small upright freezer which was large enough to both put the Solidoodle inside and allow for the full build volume we were aiming for," Kyle Hounsell said. 

Source: Google Images
They then needed a gas to solidify the ice cream as soon as it came out of the extruder. They built a system to spray liquid nitrogen onto the ice cream as it was extruded."To ensure that the extruded ice cream ended up with constant characteristics, the cryogen line was bent in a circle to go all the way around the extruder and spray the liquid nitrogen evenly around the printed ice cream," they said.

Source: Google Images

"We were inspired to design this printer because we wanted to make something fun with this up and coming technology in a way that we could grab the attention of kids. We felt that it was just as important to come up with a new technology as it was to interest the younger generation in pursuing science and technology so we can continue pushing the limits of what is possible," Bunker told 3ders.org.

It's interesting to see the research focussed on generating interest in the younger generation as well. Hope we get to see these in ice-cream parlors soon!
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India Ranks 155 out of 178 Countries in Environment!

Thursday, January 30, 2014
India has ranked 155 out of 178 countries in Environmental Performance Index 2014. The 2014 Environmental Performance Index is a joint project between the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy (YCELP) and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University, in collaboration with the World Economic Forum and support from the Samuel Family Foundation and the McCall MacBain Foundation.

What is EPI Rank?
The Environmental Performance Index (EPI) ranks how well countries perform on high-priority environmental issues in two broad policy areas: protection of human health from environmental harm and protection of ecosystems. Within these two policy objectives the EPI scores country performance in nine issue areas comprised of 20 indicators. Indicators in the EPI measure how close countries are to meeting internationally established targets or, in the absence of agreed targets, how they compare to the range of observed countries.


What are these Indicators?
These two objectives, Environmental Health and Ecosystem Vitality, are divided into nine issue categories that span high-priority environmental policy issues, including air quality, forests, fisheries, and climate and energy, among others. Underlying the nine issue categories are 20 indicators calculated from country-level data and statistics.


India's performance in these Indicators
India's performance in these indicators is below average but below is an image from their website which shows the trend as compared to last decade in each of the parameters. The health impacts and agriculture have increased as compared to last decade slightly but the major increase India has shown is in Water & Sanitation.



  1. Environmental Health

Health Impacts - India's Rank 127 
Health Impacts measures the probability of death between a child’s first and fifth birthdays. During this time, causes of death are strongly influenced by environmental factors, including air pollution, airborne particulates, and lack of access to clean drinking water. The probability of child mortality has decreased from 0.04 in 1990 to 0.01 in 2012 and thus our rank has improved which is a positive start. This shows that the health facilities in India have improved in the last decade. However, we still rank 127 in this indicator which should be improved. 
Health Impacts

Air Quality - India's Rank 174
Air Quality measures population-weighted exposure to fine particulate matter and percentage of the population burning solid fuel for cooking. It is a issue which has 3 parameters under it.
  1. Average Exposure to PM2.5 - The average exposure to PM2.5 value has increased from 19.83 to 31.98 in the last decade.  There has been a 40% decrement due to higher exposure of people to PM2.5.
  2. PM2.5 Exceedance - The score India has got is 0 out of 100! that's a shame! The value of PM2.5 exceedance has increased from 0.45 to 0.71 and it shows a 100% decrement due to high exceedances in the PM2.5 concentrations in the ambient atmosphere.
  3. Household Air Quality – Indoor Solid Fuel Usage - It measures the percentage of the population burning solid fuel (biomass such as wood, crop residues, dung, charcoal and coal) for cooking. Its value  has decreased from 87 in 1990 to 58 in 2010. There has been a 32.91% improvement in the last decade in this parameter. This shows people are moving to more refined products which are less polluting in nature.
Air Quality

Water and Sanitation - India's Rank 124
Water and Sanitation tracks percentage of population with access to improved drinking water sources and improved sanitation, including pit latrines and toilets. This index has shown an improvement of 54% in the last decade which is a tremendous achievement for our country.

This category includes two indicators: 
  1. Access to Drinking Water- This parameter takes into account the percentage of people who have access to safe drinking water. This has increased from 70.3 to 91.63 since 1990 which shows the accessibility of people to safe drinking water is increasing.
  2. Access to Sanitation - This parameter takes into account the percentage of people who have access to safe and secure means of sanitation. Our score in this is 6.2 out of 100 which is tremendously low, however there has been a 68% increment in the score in the last decade.
These indicators show that our water and sanitation problems are decreasing, however we have a long way to go. 

Water & Sanitation

2. Ecosystem Vitality
The parameters in Ecosystem Vitality include Water Resources, Agriculture, Forests, Fisheries, Biodiversity and Habitat, and Climate and Energy. Out of all these, only Agriculture has shown some improvement in these years. Agricultural subsidies and pesticide regulations have been imposed to a certain extent which is really important for a country like India as the main occupation here is agriculture.
Agriculture

In rest of the parameters, we have a long way to go to. Our environmental health is on an increase, so now we need to focus on ecosystem vitality. Climate, Forests, Biodiversity also need to be preserved for a better functioning of our ecosystem. In energy sector, we have shown improvement in the access to electricity by making it accessible even in remote areas. 
The following figure shows are performance in these rest of the parameters:
Ecosystem Vitality Indicators
155 out of 178! We surely need to work a lot harder to improve our Environmental Performance Index! 
All the data has been collected from EPI's website: http://epi.yale.edu/epi
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