I wanted to write this post for so long,ever since i watched the movie, Juno, prompted by its Oscar nomination.

So its clear from the title that i dint like Juno. I liked the “witty” humor, Miss Ellen Page’s acting,but Juno as a movie on the whole gets a thumbs down from me.

Juno taught me why a movie like Taare Zameen Par (TZP) can get get ratings which are low by its standard (respecting opinions of all) Earlier i used to wonder why a movie deserving between 8-10 was getting ratings like 0,1 and 2! Ofcourse we have lobbyists who work tirelessly to bring movie of their fav actor’s competitor down and could not digest TZP in IMDB Top 250 list and brought it down. Apart from it, US voters only gave it 5.8 on an avergae as opposed to 8.5 by non-US (mostly Indians and Bollywood lovers as this is a bollywood movie).
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When i started blogging one year ago, i dint really know the power of wordpress. I only had a few plugins installed. And then over a period of time, i came to know about other plugins and realised the power of Wordpress actually lies in the plugins we can use with it. But i learnt that after some good time of experimentation and expirience.

So here i am with a new blog and setup-ing the new blog is a time consuming job (its not difficult with Fantastico or Wordpress’s own 5 minutes install,but it is time consuming given that you have to select themes and plugins and all). So i had to make a list of plugins which you need when you start afresh with a new blog. These are just the bare-minimum you need. Ofcourse, you still can need others depending upon the nature and target of your blog.

Here they are (in no particular order):

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Look at this for a real “worthy-of-a-prize” Halloween costume. Heidi Klum dressed up like Hindu Godess Kali on this Halloween.

She dressed up pretty good and its hard to recognise her.Howzdat for a Halloween costume? Thats a scary Halloween costume isnt?

[click pictures to enlarge]

India’s 1st lunar probe,Chandrayaan-I is well on its journey to moon. It has started sending pictures from space. ISRO recently recieved pictures taken by Chandrayaan-I on 29 October, a week after Chandrayaan-I took off from Srikarikota.The pictures were taken from the on board Terrain Mapping Camera or TMC. The first picture(image 1) taken from an altitude of 9,000 km shows the Northern coast of Australia while the other (image 2) taken from a height of 70,000 km shows Australia’s Southern Coast. As you can see the resolutions of the images is good,even from an altitude of 9,000 km or 70,000 kms. I cant wait to see the images it clicks of the moon from the height of 100km. Surely they will provide very detailed view of moon’s surface. There are talks that the high resolution 3D pics taken by Chandrayaan-I will put to rest to the conspiracies and theories about whether or not US made or faked the landing on the moon.

Stem cells have been a buzzing topic in the scientific community for some time now. As many number of researchers are in favour of Stem cell research as there are against any development related to the subject. What makes Stem cells such a hot topic among intellects? Well, we first need to understand what stem cells are, and what effect can they have on us and our lives.

In a layman’s language, stem cells are cells that are produced in our bodies which are capable of differentiating(developing into) any of the type of cells. That means, a stem cell can, under different or specific growth conditions, made to develop into a neuron(brain cell), cardiac(heart) cell, or your muscle cell or your kidney cell and so on.You can compare stem cells with a tree. A tree has a backbone,”stem” which supports all the branches,which in turn support all the leaves and flowers. A stem is from where everything originates in a tree. Similarly, our stem cells are the backbone of all the cells in our body. All other cells in our body originate from stem cells.

This is how your whole body is formed, from stem cells.

Stem cells on the basis of there ability to form different types of cells can be divided into 4 classes: (more…)