Scholarships to study Abroad

Want to use research to find solutions to global problems? Queensland University of Technology (QUT) wants to help pay your bills while you study!

QUT is offering first class honours graduates a range of scholarships for PhD and masters projects that will help make the world a better place.

Find out more and apply now! Applications close 13 October:
http://www.qut.edu.au/research/scholarships-and-funding/research-scholarships?utm_source=sciencealert&utm_medium=socialmedia&utm_campaign=qut_research_scholarships

Loneliness

Loneliness is not a feeling when you are alone, it is a feeling when no one cares.

Is this the most extraordinary human brain ever seen?

This is a human brain without grooves and folds, a condition known as lissencephaly. It belonged to a patient who died in a mental health facility in 1970, and almost a year ago a photographer found the jar containing the brain in a collection at the University of Texas, Austin. People with this rare condition suffer from seizures, muscle spasms, a range of learning difficulties, and usually die before the age of ten. 

ONCE you know what it is, this apparently innocuous picture of a blob assumes a terrible gravity. It is an adult human brain that is entirely smooth – free of the ridges and folds so characteristic of our species' most complex organ.

We can only imagine what life was like for this person. He or she was a resident of what is now North Texas State Hospital, a mental health facility,and died there in 1970, but that's all we know. While the jar containing the brain is labelled with a reference number, the microfilm containing the patient's medical records has been lost.

Photographer Adam Voorhes spent a year trying to track down more information about this and nearly 100 other human brains held in a collection at the University of Texas, Austin, to no avail. The label on the jar states that the patient had agyria – a lack of gyri and sulci, the ridges and folds formed by the normally wrinkled cerebral cortex. This rare condition, also known aslissencephaly, often leads to death before the age of 10. It can cause muscle spasms, seizures and, as it vastly reduces the surface area of this key part of the brain, a range of learning difficulties.

David Dexter, who runs the Parkinson's UK Brain Bank at Imperial College London, says he has never seen anything like this before: "We do get the odd individual where certain sulci are missing but nothing to the extent of this brain." Dexter says he is not surprised the person survived to adulthood since the brain is so adaptive, though he guesses there would be deleterious effects.

Earlier this year the University of Texas took delivery of an MRI scanner to document the structure of the brains in the collection in detail. While this might teach us more about the brain itself, the identity of the person who had this extraordinary brain – and details of his or her life – seem to be lost forever.

Need For Speed Movie official trailer

Need For Speed Movie official trailer...... watch here :
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fsrJWUVoXeM

Bat toad ?

Bat toad? Not really, if you look closer you’ll see this cane toad has something in its mouth. The picture was taken in Peru a few weeks ago, and it’s perhaps the first ever sighting of a cane toad feeding on a bat. The photographer said that “the bat just flew directly into the mouth of the toad, which almost seemed to be sitting with its mouth wide open.”

FULL STORY :  This toad appears to be a fan of star wars... or is it using blinders...? or does it have giant ears...? or what is that sticking out of its mouth!?

Look closely and you'll realize that this is a rare, and perhaps first, sighting of a cane toad feeding on a bat. Yes, this happened.

This photo was taken at a remote guard station in Peru by park ranger Yufani Olaya at Cerros de Amotape National Park. He gave us permission to write about the photo, but we're waiting to hear back from him on more details about where exactly he found it, and how he thinks a ground-dwelling toad could have captured a bat. 

We're unsure how common this is, but we do know that this is probably the first photographed record of a cane toad feeding on a bat.  Cane toads are notoriously opportunistic feeders, and while they are native to South America this trait has made them infamously invasive in places like Australia.

Without more information about this photo it can be difficult to guess how a ground-dwelling toad and a flying bat could ever cross paths, unless the bat had fallen.

My best guess? I have seen bats and toads use similar locations in the rainforest, just not at the same time. Both are known to use small holes along streamsides, so it's possible this bat decided to roost in a hole that was inhabited by a hungry toad, which after some difficulty swallowing took a walk to get its photo taken by Olaya.

Here in the Tambopata rainforest we often run across cane toads- but from now on we'll keep an extra close eye out for what's in their mouths. 

We'll keep you in the loop as we get more information on this odd and fascinating sighting.

Update: Sept 23, 2013 10:00am

We finally got in touch with Olaya. As was suggested by John Scanlon in a comment on a repost of this story on Why Evolution Is True, it appears the bat was flying a bit too close to the ground. Many bats will feed on insects flying near the ground or will glean insects that are actually on the ground (pallid bats in the US are a great example of the latter).

Olaya described the toad's success as "out of nowhere the bat just flew directly into the mouth of the toad, which almost seemed to be sitting with its mouth wide open." With toad-like reflexes, this cane toad was able to snatch the unsuspecting bat right out of the air as it flew too close to the ground, and apparently directly at the toad's awaiting mouth.

So, did the toad finally get those wings in its mouth? According to Olaya, no. The toad finally gave up and spat it out. While Olaya at first thought the bat was dead, he said it slowly recovered and was able to fly away. I'm sure it won't make that mistake again.

World Record Solar Cell With 44.7% Efficiency

The new world record for solar cell efficiency is 44.7%, scientists announced a few days ago. They achieved this by using new solar cell structures with four solar subcells. This is a major step towards reducing solar electricity costs. The previous record was 43.6%.

World record solar cell with 44.7% efficiency,
 made up of four solar subcells
based on III-V compound semiconductors
 for use in concentrator photovoltaics.
(Credit: © Fraunhofer ISE)

Sep. 23, 2013 — The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE, Soitec, CEA-Leti and the Helmholtz Center Berlin jointly announced today having achieved a new world record for the conversion of sunlight into electricity using a new solar cell structure with four solar subcells. Surpassing competition after only over three years of research, and entering the roadmap at world class level, a new record efficiency of 44.7% was measured at a concentration of 297 suns. This indicates that 44.7% of the solar spectrum's energy, from ultraviolet through to the infrared, is converted into electrical energy. This is a major step towards reducing further the costs of solar electricity and continues to pave the way to the 50% efficiency roadmap.

Back in May 2013, the German-French team of Fraunhofer ISE, Soitec, CEA-Leti and the Helmholtz Center Berlin had already announced a solar cell with 43.6% efficiency. Building on this result, further intensive research work and optimization steps led to the present efficiency of 44.7%.

These solar cells are used in concentrator photovoltaics (CPV), a technology which achieves more than twice the efficiency of conventional PV power plants in sun-rich locations. The terrestrial use of so-called III-V multi-junction solar cells, which originally came from space technology, has prevailed to realize highest efficiencies for the conversion of sunlight to electricity. In this multi-junction solar cell, several cells made out of different III-V semiconductor materials are stacked on top of each other. The single subcells absorb different wavelength ranges of the solar spectrum.

"We are incredibly proud of our team which has been working now for three years on this four-junction solar cell," says Frank Dimroth, Department Head and Project Leader in charge of this development work at Fraunhofer ISE. "This four-junction solar cell contains our collected expertise in this area over many years. Besides improved materials and optimization of the structure, a new procedure called wafer bonding plays a central role. With this technology, we are able to connect two semiconductor crystals, which otherwise cannot be grown on top of each other with high crystal quality. In this way we can produce the optimal semiconductor combination to create the highest efficiency solar cells."

"This world record increasing our efficiency level by more than 1 point in less than 4 months demonstrates the extreme potential of our four-junction solar cell design which relies on Soitec bonding techniques and expertise," says André-Jacques Auberton-Hervé, Soitec's Chairman and CEO. "It confirms the acceleration of the roadmap towards higher efficiencies which represents a key contributor to competitiveness of our own CPV systems. We are very proud of this achievement, a demonstration of a very successful collaboration."

"This new record value reinforces the credibility of the direct semiconductor bonding approaches that is developed in the frame of our collaboration with Soitec and Fraunhofer ISE. We are very proud of this new result, confirming the broad path that exists in solar technologies for advanced III-V semiconductor processing," said Leti CEO Laurent Malier. Concentrator modules are produced by Soitec (started in 2005 under the name Concentrix Solar, a spin-off of Fraunhofer ISE). This particularly efficient technology is employed in solar power plants located in sun-rich regions with a high percentage of direct radiation. Presently Soitec has CPV installations in 18 different countries including Italy, France, South Africa and California.

Niblings

The plural, gender-neutral term for "nieces and
nephews" is "niblings"

A water mystery

The fact that hot water freezes faster than cold water still remains a mystery.

Scientists discover 'black holes' at sea

WASHINGTON: Some of the largest ocean eddies on Earth are mathematically equivalent to the mysterious black holes of space, scientists say.

These eddies are so tightly shielded by circular water paths that nothing caught up in them escapes.

George Haller, Professor of Nonlinear Dynamics at ETH Zurich, and Francisco Beron-Vera, Research Professor of Oceanography at the University of Miami, have developed a new mathematical technique to find water-transporting eddies with coherent boundaries.

The challenge in finding such eddies is to pinpoint coherent water islands in a turbulent ocean. The rotating and drifting fluid motion appears chaotic to the observer both inside and outside an eddy.

Haller and Beron-Vera were able to restore order in this chaos by isolating coherent water islands from a sequence of satellite observations. To their surprise, such coherent eddies turned out to be mathematically equivalent to black holes.

Black holes are objects in space with a mass so great that they attract everything that comes within a certain distance of them. Nothing that comes too close can escape, not even light.

But at a critical distance, a light beam no longer spirals into the black hole. Rather, it dramatically bends and comes back to its original position, forming a circular orbit.

Haller and Beron-Vera discovered similar closed barriers around select ocean eddies. In these barriers, fluid particles move around in closed loops ? similar to the path of light in a photon sphere. And as in a black hole, nothing can escape from the inside of these loops, not even water.

It is these barriers that help to identify coherent ocean eddies in the vast amount of observational data available. The very fact that such coherent water orbits exist amidst complex ocean currents is surprising, researchers said.

Because black-hole-type ocean eddies are stable, they function in the same way as a transportation vehicle - not only for micro-organisms such as plankton or foreign bodies like plastic waste or oil, but also for water with a heat and salt content that can differ from the surrounding water.

Haller and Beron-Vera have verified this observation for the Agulhas Rings, a group of ocean eddies that emerge regularly in the Southern Ocean off the southern tip of Africa and transport warm, salty water northwest.

The researchers identified seven Agulhas Rings of the black-hole type, which transported the same body of water without leaking for almost a year.

Haller points out that similar coherent vortices exist in other complex flows outside of the ocean. In this sense, many whirlwinds are likely to be similar to black holes as well.

The study was published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

The Moon Is 100 Million Years Younger Than Thought

This artist's conception of a planetary smashup whose debris was spotted by 
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope in 2009 gives an impression
 of the carnage that would have been wrecked 
when a similar impact created Earth's moon.
 Image released Oct. 17, 2012.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The moon is quite a bit younger than scientists had previously believed, new research suggests.

The leading theory of how the moon formed holds that it was created when a mysterious planet — one the size of Mars or larger — slammed into Earth about 4.56 billion years ago, just after the solar system came together. But new analyses of lunar rocks suggest that the moon, which likely coalesced from the debris blasted into space by this monster impact, is actually between 4.4 billion and 4.45 billion years old.

The finding, which would make the moon 100 million years younger than previously thought, could reshape scientists' understanding of the early Earth as well as its natural satellite, researchers said.

A message to the space

If you could upload a message onto NASA's New Horizons rocket to sail into deep space, what would you say?
http://www.newhorizonsmessage.com/

Enjoy Traditional South Indian Dish - RAVA DOSA

http://www.gayatrivantillu.com/recipes-2/breakfast/ravvadosa

1 in 50 million multi-colored lobster

Fisherman catches 1 in 50 million multi-colored lobster

I wonder how did ORANGE color got its name?

The color orange was named after the fruit, not the other way around.

Caves carved 155ft off the ground

Mysterious ancient kingdom discovered in Nepal where estimated thousands of caves are carved 155ft off the ground

courtesy :Richards/ Nat Geo creative

Bouncing Naked EGG

Dissolve egg shell off with Vinegar and it will become
 a "Naked egg" that can bounce.

Diamond encrusted Mercedes

Saudi Prince Alwaleed owns a diamond encrusted $48 million Mercedes and he charges $1000 just to touch it.

Driverless Cars

Google has created and tested driverless cars on the streets of California, and over the course of 300,000 miles, they’ve only been in two accidents.

Wonderful photos

1. Pleneau Bay, Antarctica. 

2. Armadillo-Girdled lizard

3. Krzywy Domek (Crooked House) in Sopot, Poland.

Jacob Barnett,14-Year-Old With Asperger's Syndrome, May Be Smarter Than Einstein

Jake has an IQ believed to be higher than Einstein's, but at the age of two he was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome and doctors told his mum he'd likely never speak or read. She refused to give up on his education and he's now taking his Master Degree at Waterloo's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada.

When Jacob Barnett was 2 years old, he was diagnosed with moderate to severe autism. Doctors told his parents that the boy would likely never talk or read and would probably be forever unable to independently manage basic daily activities like tying his shoe laces.

But they were sorely, extraordinarily mistaken.

Today, Barnett -- now 14 -- is a Master's student, on his way to earning a PhD in quantum physics. According to the BBC, the teen, who boasts an IQ of 170, has already been tipped to one day win the Nobel Prize.

Since enrolling at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) at the age of 10, Barnett has flourished -- astounding his professors, peers and family with his spectacular intelligence.

The teen tutors other college students in subjects like calculus and is a published scientific researcher, with an IQ that is believed to be higher than that of Albert Einstein. In fact, according to a 2011 TIME report, Barnett, who frequently tops his college classes, has asserted that he may one day disprove Einstein's Theory of Relativity. (Watch him explain his genius to 60 minutes' Morley Safer in a 2012 interview in the video above.)

Outside of his rigorous university commitments, Barnett, who has Asperger's Syndrome, is also an entrepreneur and aspiring author. 

The teen, who, with his family, runs a charity called Jacob's Place for kids on the spectrum, has used his story to raise awareness and dispel myths about autism.

"I'm not supposed to be here at all," he said last year during a TEDx Teen speech about "forgetting what you know" in New York City. "You know, I was told that I wouldn't talk. There's probably a therapist watching who is freaking out right now."

Though he makes it all look so easy,his mother, Kristine Barnett, says that he has to work hard on a daily basis to handle his autism.

"He overcomes it every day. There are things he knows about himself that he regulates everyday," his mother told the Indianapolis Star last month.

In April, Kristine Barnett's memoir about her family's experience with autism, "The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius," was released. A movie deal is said to be in the works.

Originally taken from: http://huff.to/10iAjvn via Huffington Post, Image: Tim Anderson

The Hoover Dam was built to last 2,000 years. Its concrete will not be fully cured for another 500 years.

If the population of China walked past you in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction!

ScienceShot: Shhh! Someone Might Hear Us

Zookeepers at Central Park Zoo in the US assumed their cotton-top tamarins were falling silent every time someone entered their enclosure, but spectrograms, which provide visual representations of sound, revealed what was really going on. These little monkeys were actually whispering their alarm calls instead of shouting them, which is the first evidence of whispering in a non-human primate species.


Image: Trisha Shears; Wikimedia

Whispering can be a smart way to have a private conversation. So it’s not surprising that other species—from corn borer moths to ground squirrels to certain fish—do something like it, too. Now, researchers have added the first nonhuman primate species, cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus), to the list. The discovery was made at New York City’s Central Park Zoo during an experiment designed to capture alarm calls that the tamarins reportedly make when afraid of people. But instead of making the calls when a worker they feared stepped inside their enclosure, the tamarins seemed to fall silent, the researchers report online this week in Zoo Biology. Only when the scientists analyzed spectrograms (graphical representations of the sounds) did they realize the tamarins were whispering their alarm calls instead of shouting them. Leading evolutionary scientists had predicted that whispers would likely be found in highly cooperative species like the tamarins, because it’s an easy way to avoid eavesdroppers. You can hear a tamarin’s sharp chirp above. Actually, if you could hear the soft chirp, you’re most likely a tamarin.

Having a beard

Having a beard is equivalent to wearing 30 SPF sunscreen on your face.

The Red-fan Parrot

The Red-fan Parrot also known as the Hawk-headed Parrot, is an unusual New World parrot hailing from the Amazon Rainforest. The Red-fan Parrot possesses elongated neck feathers that can be raised to form an elaborate fan.

Human Energy before & after Meditation

Here is a picture of the human bio-energy field after meditation taken using Kirlian photography. The human Aura is an energy field of 7 Layers that surrounds and goes through the physical body in an egg shape or bubble of spiritual light, colour, sound, feelings and Life Energy.

Meditation brings the 7 energy systems, or chakras, into harmony allowing for emotional, physical, and spiritual coherence which translates into a natural flow of energy through the body.
"A condition of health exists when each chemical in the physical body has the etheric chemical counterpart in the etheric body at the appropriate concentrations." - Dr. William Tiller, Stanford University.

Pencil & Eraser

It took over 200 years after the pencil was
invented for
someone to invent the eraser.

Cosmologists have formulated a new theory that suggest the universe didn’t start with the Big Bang.

Cosmologists have formulated a new theory that suggest the universe didn’t start with the Big Bang. They believe the birth of the universe happened after a 4D star collapsed into a black hole and ejected debris, which helps explain why the universe has an almost uniform temperature.

It could be time to bid the Big Bang bye-bye. Cosmologists have speculated that the Universe formed from the debris ejected when a four-dimensional star collapsed into a black hole — a scenario that would help to explain why the cosmos seems to be so uniform in all directions.

The standard Big Bang model tells us that the Universe exploded out of an infinitely dense point, or singularity. But nobody knows what would have triggered this outburst: the known laws of physics cannot tell us what happened at that moment.

“For all physicists know, dragons could have come flying out of the singularity,” says Niayesh Afshordi, an astrophysicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada.

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It is also difficult to explain how a violent Big Bang would have left behind a Universe that has an almost completely uniform temperature, because there does not seem to have been enough time since the birth of the cosmos for it to have reached temperature equilibrium.

To most cosmologists, the most plausible explanation for that uniformity is that, soon after the beginning of time, some unknown form of energy made the young Universe inflate at a rate that was faster than the speed of light. That way, a small patch with roughly uniform temperature would have stretched into the vast cosmos we see today. But Afshordi notes that “the Big Bang was so chaotic, it’s not clear there would have been even a small homogenous patch for inflation to start working on”.

On the brane
In a paper posted last week on the arXiv preprint server1, Afshordi and his colleagues turn their attention to a proposal2 made in 2000 by a team including Gia Dvali, a physicist now at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany. In that model, our three-dimensional (3D) Universe is a membrane, or brane, that floats through a ‘bulk universe’ that has four spatial dimensions.

Ashfordi's team realized that if the bulk universe contained its own four-dimensional (4D) stars, some of them could collapse, forming 4D black holes in the same way that massive stars in our Universe do: they explode as supernovae, violently ejecting their outer layers, while their inner layers collapse into a black hole.

In our Universe, a black hole is bounded by a spherical surface called an event horizon. Whereas in ordinary three-dimensional space it takes a two-dimensional object (a surface) to create a boundary inside a black hole, in the bulk universe the event horizon of a 4D black hole would be a 3D object — a shape called a hypersphere. When Afshordi’s team modelled the death of a 4D star, they found that the ejected material would form a 3D brane surrounding that 3D event horizon, and slowly expand.

The authors postulate that the 3D Universe we live in might be just such a brane — and that we detect the brane’s growth as cosmic expansion. “Astronomers measured that expansion and extrapolated back that the Universe must have begun with a Big Bang — but that is just a mirage,” says Afshordi.

Model discrepancy
The model also naturally explains our Universe’s uniformity. Because the 4D bulk universe could have existed for an infinitely long time in the past, there would have been ample opportunity for different parts of the 4D bulk to reach an equilibrium, which our 3D Universe would have inherited.

The picture has some problems, however. Earlier this year, the European Space Agency's Planck space observatory released data that mapped the slight temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background — the relic radiation that carries imprints of the Universe’s early moments. The observed patterns matched predictions made by the standard Big Bang model and inflation, but the black-hole model deviates from Planck's observations by about 4%. Hoping to resolve the discrepancy, Afshordi says that his is now refining its model.

Despite the mismatch, Dvali praises the ingenious way in which the team threw out the Big Bang model. “The singularity is the most fundamental problem in cosmology and they have rewritten history so that we never encountered it,” he says. Whereas the Planck results “prove that inflation is correct”, they leave open the question of how inflation happened, Dvali adds. The study could help to show how inflation is triggered by the motion of the Universe through a higher-dimensional reality, he says.

The ugliest animal in the world is the blobfish. Endangered and...squishy, this deep sea creature lives in waters off the coast of Australia.

MAN SLEPT NEXT TO DEAD WIFE FOR 5 YEARS

A Vietnamese man dug up his wife’s body, molded it with clay into a female figure and put it in his bed so he could hug it every night for the past five years.

The man, 55-year-old Le Van from Ha Lam in the central Quang Nam province, is seen below with his wife’s remains and his son

According to reports, Van began by sleeping upon his wife’s grave after she died in 2003. He said that a year and a half later he decided to dig a tunnel next to his wife’s grave so he could sleep beside her away from the rain and wind.

However, neighbors and local authorities found out about the practice and persuaded Van to stop. Subsequently in November 2004 Van returned to the grave, dug up his wife’s corpse and brought it home, where it remains today.

Van’s son, photographed below with his mother’s corpse, is said to hug her body before going to bed each night.

His father told the Lao Dong newspaper that his neighbours dared not visit him for years, but have since grown more accustomed to the idea and will now pay him a visit from time to time.

“I’m a person that does things differently. I’m not like normal people,” he was quoted as saying. “My wife’s body only passed away but her spirit still accompanies us. I have no fear when it comes to sleeping with her at all.”

Local authorities are said to be planning an inspection of the case because of new sanitation laws that rule a body must be cremated or buried, and that burials cannot be carried out in residential gardens without approval.

World’s most pierced man

The world’s most pierced man has 453 piercings - 278 of them are on his penis and testicles.

Onion-free cooking

Can't afford onions at the moment? Foodies tell you how you can whip up delicious dishes sans the kitchen favourite

One of the most important vegetables in any kitchen, onions are currently generating more tears than ever before, with their prices touching almost `100 a kilo a while back in Mumbai. With this staple turning precious, looks like it's time we learn to cook without them. But, is it that easy? "Yes, it is," insists foodie Sunayan Shahani, "With onion prices hitting the rooftops, I am really envious of my Jain friends. Taking cue from their recipes, you can always prepare dishes like poha and pav bhaji — which one may not be able to imagine without onions — and make them delicious even without them."

Indian food without onions
Do you like to begin your day with poha? You can do so without one of its main ingredients. Says Sunayan, "With poha, you can simply use peanuts, curry leaves, turmeric and chillies to spice it up, adding a dash of lime juice for that extra zing. Trust me, you won't miss onions. Asafoetida or hing is a great substitute to onions as well. Use it in your pav bhaji or other gravy recipes for the same flavour."

South Indian dishes show the way
City-based chef Sudhir Pai has an interesting solution — adapt South Indian dishes to North Indian flavours. "In South Indian Brahmin communities, Kerala or even Bangalore, the dry veg component is always the vegetable itself and a tadka. And in wet preparations, coconut is used. A North Indian can adopt this cooking by using his or her traditional masala with this cooking style. You can have avial, tendli or parwal sans onions or the Mangalorean fish gassi or kori roti (chicken curry made with roasted spices). It's also very beneficial to cook without onions as lesser oil would obviously be used." Of course, Mughlai cooking might not be as easy to do without this ingredient. "If you have to make a Mughlai gravy, use khus-khus (poppy seeds), chaar magaz (pumpkin seeds) or cashewnuts ground in water. This might not be a cheap option, though," he says.

Bengali food works well too
While several Indian dishes must have onions, some cuisines do away with them entirely, likeBengali food. Affirms blogger and foodie Kalyan Karmakar, "Most Bengali vegetarian recipes are onion-free. That's because most Bengali kitchens were once ruled by family matrons who were widows. These ladies were not allowed onions in their diet, as onions were not considered vegetarian according to the Hindu scriptures followed in these houses.

Even the patla machher jhol is made without onions in Bengali homes. "It gets its flavours from turmeric, green chillies, kalo jeere or nigella seeds and occasionally chopped tomatoes. The more regal doi maachh (fish in yogurt sauce) also does not have onions," he adds. He presents an aluposto recipe, minus onions...

Make alu posto
Boil one tablespoon of mustard oil. Add a teaspoon of panch phoron Bengali five spices and two whole green chillies. Add three parboiled potatoes cut into small cubes. Stir. Then, add the paste of 50 g of ground posto (poppy seeds) with water to the mix and stir. Add salt per taste and a quarter teaspoon of turmeric for colour. The latter is optional. Add half a tea cup of water and boil. Reduce the flame and let the mix simmer till the water dries up.