These are dismal times. Every other day I hear about the loss of someone in the extended family, friends or neighbors. To maintain sanity, locked-in, small joys of life become ever more important.
 
The Spider Lily in my balcony decided to flower.

Every day, precisely between 5 PM and 6 PM, one or two buds will open. The petals first crack open a little, which rapidly expands. The bud soon assumes a spindle shape; one of the anthers sometimes already peeking out.

With no warning the petals snap open at the tip like a spring; blink and you miss it. There you have it a fresh beautiful Spider Lily flower.
 
I love the way the 12 anthers of the two flowers that day stood up like sentinels eager to spread their pollen. By air, if I remember my high school botany correctly, because they swing on the filament.

I decided to make a time-lapse.

The time-lapse frame rate turned out to be too slow for the final moment of flowering. The movie below therefore goes through a time lapse (4X the normal speed), the normal video frame rate (where the bulge appears), and slow motion to capture the final moments (12% of the normal frame rate).

Citizen Science: If observations from n=1 are acceptable, the buds take much longer to open if it is dark. Two of the buds decided to open on the same day. One of them had already opened and the other was a now a spindle. Suddenly the clouds moved in and it became dark. The spindle shaped bud, which should have opened in less than ten minutes now took about an hour to become a flower. It was 7 PM by the time it was done.
 
(Technical: Movies and the stills were shot using iPhone 7, iOS 12.4.1.
 
I do not own a tripod or selfie stick suitable for holding phones. I dusted my trusty old Bogen Manfrotto tripod. Took out the Bogen ball head mount, which needed some oiling. The head takes an hexagonal plate. Somehow my Capdase car windscreen phone holder fitted perfectly on the mount after the plate was removed. I found an extension cord to keep the phone charging, and was all set as far as the hardware goes.
 
For the software part, I first had to find out from Internet the inner workings of different modes of the iPhone Camera app. As it turns out the time-lapse mode of the built-in App does not give users any control. Finally, I ended up using Hyperlapse, which has a hidden preference menu. Normal videos and the slow motion videos were recorded using the native Camera app.
 
To transfer large video files from the iPhone to my MacBook Air, I again needed help from the internet. Unbelievable, but one does not realize the complications until you try to do it. Finally, to make a single video clip that plays at different speeds, I had to relearn iMovie. Apple online iMovie manual is good.)

Preprint servers are great. They have made it possible for all of us to get our discoveries to the community as soon as possible, while awaiting end of the seemingly interminable submission-review-rejection-resubmission-review... cycle. They also get you a priority date (sort of). At the same time there is a push to consider an article on a preprint server as a 'publication' for promotions, awards, thesis submission... 'xkcd' has a take on this:

NASA says Voyager 2 is nearing the interstellar space.
They know it ‘because it is detecting an increase in cosmic rays that originate outside our solar system’.

This space craft has traveled 17.7 billion kilometers since it was launched more than 41 years ago on August 20, 1977. This distance is really only 118 times the distance between earth and sun.

But how does Voyager convey to us that it is detecting increase in cosmic rays. Back of the envelope calculation, or more contemporarily, your smart phone calculator, will tell you that a message from Voyager will take more that 18 hours to reach earth. In a World where cell phones keep on dropping local calls, how do we get messages from this tiny speck in the deep space!
 
This is where faith comes in.

Get this: The power of signals that earth based antennas receive from the Voyager is 20 billion times weaker than what is needed to run a digital watch. On Voyager they use a 22.4 Watt Transmitter (for Voyager 1);  something equivalent to a refrigerator light bulb, but by the time its beacon reaches us, the power has been reduced to roughly 0.1 billion-billionth of a Watt.

To detect this signal NASA has built a Deep Space Network (DSN) on earth with antennas at locations near Canberra, Australia; Madrid, Spain; and Goldstone, California. The largest of the four antennas at each site is 70 meters in diameter. The Voyager has an antenna that is 3.7 meters in diameter.

Voyagers technology is 41 years old, with computers each having 69.63 kilobytes of memory. Absolutely non-upgradable. Although DSN technology is being continuously upgraded. The DSN antennas can locate a spacecraft extremely accurately in the celestial sphere with angular measurement error measured in nano-radians (one nano-radian of error at 1 million kilometers is 100 cm). This means a certainty of knowing that Voyager is within a given sphere of diameter as small as 1800 km. That is equivalent of distance between Delhi and Chennai, looking from a distance of 17.7 billion kilometers.

The Voyager is transmitting in the 8 GHz range. Since there is not a lot of interference from man-made electromagnetic noise at this frequency, the antenna on Earth can use an extremely sensitive amplifier and still make sense of the faint signals it receives. But when the earth antenna transmits back to the spacecraft, it uses extremely high power (tens of thousands of watts) to make sure the spacecraft gets the message.

So yes! NASA says Voyager 2 is nearing the interstellar space.
They know it ‘because it is detecting an increase in cosmic rays that originate outside our solar system’.
Faith! Actually not!!

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-voyager-2-could-be-nearing-interstellar-space
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/dsn-antennas/en/
https://www.wired.com/2013/09/vintage-voyager-probes/
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/voyager-mission-anniversary-celebration-long-distance-communications/

Research in biology is also hypothesis driven. However, the greatest excitement lies in discovering the unexpected, which is often the case. You are left scrambling to do what Randall Munroe has illustrated - looking for a plot that you hope will impress the reviewers enough to accept your paper, and confuse the tenure and promotion committees to grant your wish.

alt-text: Cauchy-Lorentz: "Something alarmingly mathematical is happening, and you should probably pause to Google my name and check what field I originally worked in."

There was Ayla.

The main character of Jean Auel’s famous book Clan of the Cave Bear. Ayla broke all the rules of the Clan of (presumed) Neanderthals who had reluctantly adopted the orphaned child. She could not help herself because she was different, presumably a Cro-Maganon, an early version of Homo sapiens. Setting was Europe, perhaps 40,000 years ago, when the two species overlapped. I had read this absorbing book soon after it was published in 1980, after borrowing it from the American Centre Library near Connaught Place in New Delhi.


Then Durc came along.

Son born as a result of mating between Ayla and Broud, a man of the Clan. Auel did not have much space to develop Durc’s character in the book, but we now know that we all are descendants of Durc-like hybrids, at least those of us who are out of Africa. Simultaneously, we are also learning and accepting that Neanderthal’s were culturally quite advanced, that is, not so much Neanderthal-like, a put-down of the yore.


Now there is Denny.

The non-fictional daughter of a female Neanderthal and a male Denisovan, who got together to have some fun about 90,000 years ago. First described in 2008, Denisovans are a recent addition to the extensively branched human tree. Many of us also carry Denisovan genes.

It is mind boggling to think of the probability of finding Denny, unless frequent Ghotuls of Neanderthals and Denisovans were a norm.

(Source: Nature of 22nd August 2018; various resources on Internet, and Cave of the Clan Bear. This book had stayed fresh in my mind all these years. I recently read it again when I recommended it to my son, who could not put it down either.)